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A VOICE FROM THE PEWS: 



OR 



A TABERNACLE SUPPLEMENT 



BY 



.A MEN DER. 



J)iefc ^rebtgcr flum^ften fl(^ btc SaBnc an ben ©d^alen a^, tnbeffen 
ic6 ben i?ern gcnof.— Goethe. 




boston: 

BLANCHARD BROS., 533 TREMONT STREET. 

NEW ENGLAND NEWS COMPANY, 37 COURT STREET, 

1877. 






Copyright: 1876, by A MEN DEK. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 


Reason and Revelation . . . . 


1 


II. 


Literal Inspiration 


7 


III. 


Incongruities not Discrepancies 


13 


IV. 


The Formation of the Canon . . . 


20 


V. 


John and his Gnostic Redactor . • 


24 


VI. 


"Salvation" 


32 


VII. 


Sunday and Sabbath . . . . . 


37 


VIII. 


Asceticism and Amusement . . . 


44 


IX. 


Culture, Thought and Worship 


51 


X. 


Pharisaism and Conviction . . 


56 


XI. 


'' Conversion to Christ " . . . . 


66 


XII. 


Paul on Faith and Resurrection 


75 


XIII. 


" Experiencing Religion "... 


82 


XIV. 


Prophecy and Rhapsody . . . 


89 


XV. 


Apprehending Christ . . .^ . 


95 


XVI. 


God 


99 


XVII. 


Benefit of Prayer, Subjective . 


. 103 


XVIII 


, Fasting 


. 107 


XIX 


. Sin and Hell 


. Ill 


XX 


. Happiness and Heaven . . . . 
Appendix 


. 117 



A. 

{Page 111: "Benefit of Prayer, Subjective."] 

As an example under the subjective theory, the writer would 
quote a paragraph or two from a book of <' Prayers, " published 
at Boston, in 1862, by Walker, Wise & Co. No matter who was 
the author ; the matter is the prayer :— 

'* FATHER, v/e know thou wilt always remember us, nor askest 
thou the persuasive music of our morning hymn, nor our prayers' 
poor utterance to stir thy loving-kindness toward vis ; for thou 
carest for us when sleep has sealed our senses up and we heed 
thee no more ; yea, when enveloped in the smoke of human ig- 
norance or of folly, thine eye is still upon us,thouunderstandest 
our needs, and doest for us more and better than we are able to 
ask or even to think. But in our feebleness and our darkness, 
we love to flee unto thee, who art the light of all our being, the 
strength of all that is strong, the wisdom of what is wise, and 
the foundation of all things that are ; and while we lift up our 
prayer of aspiration unto thee and muse on thy presence with 
us, and the various events of our life, the fire of devotion must 
needs flame in our hearts, and gratitude dwell on our tongue. * * 
€hiefliest of all do we bless thee for that noble son of thine, born 
of a peasant mother and a peasant sire, who in days of great 
darkness went before men, his life a pillar of fire leading them 
unto marvellous light and peace and beauty. We thank thee for 
his words, so lustrous with truth, for his life, fragrant all through 
with piety and benevolence; yea. Lord, we bless thee for the 
death which sinful hands nailed into his lacerated flesh, where 
through the wounds the spirit escaped triumphant unto thee, 
aud could not be holden of mortal death. We thank thee for the 
triumphs which attend that name of Jesus, for the dear bless- 
edness which his life has bestowed us, smoothing the pathway 
of toil, softening the pillow of distress, and brightening the 
way whereon truth comes down from thee, and life to thee goes 
ever ascending up. Father, we thank thee for the blessingg 
which this great noble soul has widely scattered throughout the 



Z APPENDIX. 

•world, and most of all for this, that his spark of lire has re- 
vealed to us thine own divinity enlivening this mortal human 
clod, and prophesying such noble future of achievement here on 
earth and in thine OAvn kingdom of heaven with thee. * * * 
Help us to use the nature thou hast given us wisely and well. 
Vfe w^ould not ask thee to change thy law, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever, but pray that ourselves may accord our dis- 
positions to thine own infinite excellence, and order the out- 
goings and incomings of our heart in such wisdom that our lives 
shall continually be in accordance with thy life, that thy will 
shall be the law of our spirits, and thy love prevail forever in 
our hearts. So may we be adorned and strengthened with man- 
ifold righteousness, mount up with wings as eagles, run and not 
be weary, or walk and never faint. So may thy kingdom come 
and thy w^ill be done on earth as it is in heaven." 

The pastor who put up the foregoing prayer was denounced 
therefor as "infidel" by a prominent "evangelical" in whose 
family was often heard, in the tune of "Naomi," the following 
sweet hymn of Merrick's: 

" Author of good, we rest on thee : 

Thine ever watchful eye - 
Alone our real wants can see, — 

Thy hand alone supply. 

In thine all gracious providence 

Our cheerful hopes confide ; 
O let thy power be our defence,— 

Thy love our footsteps guide. 

And since by passion's force subdued, 

Too oft with stubborn will, 
We blindly shun the latent good, 

And grasp the specious ill,— 

Not what we wish, but what we want, 

Let mercy still supply : 
The good unasked, O Father, grant; 

The ill, though asked, deny. 

[Ko. 633, Methodist Hymns.'] 



APPENDIX. 



B. 

[Page 112: " Sin and Hell."] 

Reference is had to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his masterly 
story of " Elsie Venner." (A few months before her birth, her 
mother had been bitten by a crotallus.) 

" Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in an ab- 
stract kind of way ; they have a sort of algebra of human na- 
ture in which friction and strength (or weakness) of material are 
left out. You see a doctor is in the way of studying children 
from the moment of birth upwards. For the first year or so, he 
sees that they are just as much pupils of their Maker as the 
young of any other animals. Well, their Maker trains them to 
pure selfishness. Why ? In order that tliey may be sure to take 
care of themselves, so you see when a child comes to be, we 
will say a year and a day old and makes his first choice between 
right and wrong, he is at a disadvantage ; for he has that vis a 
tergo, as we doctors call it, that force from behind, of a whole 
year's life of selfishness, for which lie is no more to blame than 
a calf is to blame for having lived in the same way purely to 
gratify his natural appetites. Then we see that baby grow up to 
a child, and if he is fat and stout and red and lively, we expect 
to find him troublesome and noisy and perhaps sometimes diso- 
bedient more or less : that's the way each new generation breaks 
its egg-shell; but if he is very weak and thin, and is one of the 
kind that may be expected to die early, he will very likely sit in 
the house all day and read good books about other little sharp 
faced children just like himself, who died early, having always 
been perfectly indifferent to all the out-door amusements of the 
wicked little red-cheeked children. Some of the little folks we 
watch grow up to be young women, and occasionally one of them 
gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and that girl will begin to 
play all sorts of pranks,— to lie and cheat, perhaps in the most 
unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a minister a good 
example of total depravity. We don't see her in that light. We 
give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback if we can, 
and so expect to make her will come all right again. By and by 
we are called to see an old baby, three score years and ten or 
more old. We find that this old baby has never got rid of that 
first year's teaching which led him to fill his stomach with all 
he could pump into it, and his hands with everything he could 



4 APPENDIX. 

grab. People call him a miser. We are sorry for him ; but- we 
can't help remembering his first year's training and the natural 
effect of money on the great majority of those that have it. So 
while the ministers say < he shall hardly enter into the kingdom 
of heaven,' we like to remind them that with God all things are 
possible." 

"Once more. We see all kinds of monomania and insanity. 
We learn from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in 
minds supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compas- 
sion for a large class of persons condemned as sinners by theo- 
logians but considered by us as invalids. We have constant rea- 
sons for noticing the transmission of qualities from parents to 
offspring, and we find it hard to hold a child accountable in any 
moral point of view for inherited bad temper or tendency to 
drunkenness, — as hard as we should to blame him for inheriting 
gout or asthma. I suppose we are more lenient with human na- 
ture than theologians generally are. We know that the spirits 
of men and their views of the present and future go up and 
down with the barometer, and that a permanent depression of 
one inch in the murcurial column would affect the whole theol- 
ogy of Christendom. 

<']VIinisters talk about the human will as if it stood on a high 
look-out, with plenty of light, and elbow-room reaching to the 
horizon. Doctors are constantly noticing how it is tied up and 
darkened by inferior organization, by disease and all sorts of 
crowding interferences, until they get to look upon Hottentots 
and Indians— and a good many of their own race— as a kind of 
self-conscious blood-clocks, with a very limited power of self- 
detern^ination. That's the tendency, I say, of doctors' experi- 
ence, but the people to whom they address their statements of 
the results of their observation belong to the thinking class o^ 
the highest races, and they are conscious of a great deal of lib- 
erty of will. So in the fact that civilization with all it offers 
has — on the whole — proved a dead failure with the aboriginal 
races of this country, they talk as if they knew from their own 
will all about that of a Digger Indian. # # * # * 

"We know that disease has something back of it, which the 
body isn't to blame for, at least, in most cases, and which very 
often it is trying to get rid of. Just so, with sin. I will agree to 
take a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock and return 
seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and honest if not 
* pious' children. And I will take another hundred of a differ- 
ent stock, and put them in the hands of certain Ann-street or 
Five-point teachers, aud seventy-five of them will be thieves 



APPENDIX. 



and liars at the end of the same dozen years. .... You in- 
herit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no 
children, or none to speak of. It didn't seem much to condemn 
a few thousand millions of peeple to purgatory or worse for a 
mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a 
child look upon their faces and say < father.' '* 



C. 

[Page 118 : " Happiness and Heaven."] 

George Elliot's context is too pertinent and illustrative to he 

omitted: , 

*' She was on the brink of di'owning herself m despair. Some 
ray or other came, which made her feel that she ought to live- 
that it was good to live. She is full of piety and seams capable 
of submitting to anything when it takes the form of duty.' 

*« Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impa- 
tientlv. "I have no sympathy with women who are always do- 
ing right. I don't believe in their great sufferings." 

''It is true," said Deronda, " that the consciousness of having 
done wrong is something deeper, more bitter. I suppose we 
faulty creatures can never feel so much for the irreproachable 
as for those who are bruised in the struggle with their own 
faults. It is a very ancient story, that of the lost sheep, but it 
comes up fresh eveiy day." ^^ 

"That is a way of speaking— it is not acted on, it is not real, 
said Gv/endolen, bitterly. " You admire Miss Lapidoth because 
you think her blameless, perfect. And you know you would de- 
spise a woman who had done something you thought very 

wrong." ^ T 4- 1 

•' That would depend entirely on her own view of what she 
had done," said Deronda. 

"You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I sup- 
pose?" said Gwendolen, impetuously. 

"No, not satisfied-full of sorrow for her. It was not a mere 
way of speaking. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is 
not more adorable; I meant that those who would oe compara- 
tively uninteresting before«hand may become worthier of sym- 
pathy when they do something that awakens in them a keen re- 



b APPENDIX, 

morse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I dare say some 
would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent 
shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when 
they are suffering in that way, one must care for them more 

than for the comfortably self-satisfied One who has 

committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that con- 
sciousness into a higher course than is common. There are 
many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may 
well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled." . . . 
Some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world be- 
yond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of so 
many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for 
want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. ... 
• Take what you said of music for a small example— it answers for 
all larger things— you will not cultivate it for the sake of a pri- 
vate joy in it. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any 
spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction ? If one 
firmament has no stimulus for our attention and awe, I don't see 
how four would have it. "We should stamp every possible world 
with the flatness of our own inanity— which is necessarily impi- 
ous, without faith or fellowship. The refuge you are needing 
from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which 
holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appe- 
tites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by 
an elevation of feeling: but for us who have to struggle for -our 
wisdom, the higher Itf e must be a region in which the affections 
are clad with knowledge." 



D. 

[Page 118: *' Happiness and Heaven."] 

The writer can present nothing more satisfactory on the sub- 
ject of Human Destiny than the following summary of part of a 
sermon by Rev. Herman Bisbee, at the Hawes Place Church, 
South Boston, Mass., Dec. 10th, 1876 : Text, Matt. v. 20. 

Every candid reader of the Xew Testament has observed that 
the discourse of Christ abounds in warnings of some immi- 
nent danger to the human soul ; something to be shunned at the 
cost of property, standing, friends and life itself. As to the 
character of this danger, the indefiniteness of his expressions 



APPENDIX. 7 

leaves a large margin for honest differences of opinion. ... To 
foretell all that constitutes heaven, one must be omniscient; 
and the same is true as to hell. Language fails to exhaust these 
themes, just as the eye fails to take in the Universe when it 
looks at the stars. And this infiintude of the concerns of the 
soul has afforded ground for the play of imagination, until ex- 
agerated phantasies have superseded simple facts. And then, as 
with everything else in life, the revolting aspect of one extreme 
has caused a reaction to the opposite. 

But the fact that heaven means the sum of human blessed, 
ness, is not affected by the limitations of our knowledge how far 
that blessedness may go, what varieties it has, what laws of un- 
f oldment, or what places for realization. So also, what Christ 
calls destruction or hell has a clear and solemn meaning, al- 
though no man may paint its outlines, or describe its sorrows. 
One who looks out upon the sea has a clear and magnificent idea 
of Ocean, although he sees but its beginnings. So far as we do 
behold human life, there stand out the two great possibilities. 
In Buddha, in Socrates, in Mohammed, in Swedenborg, in all na- 
tions and peoples have these two ideas lain side by side as we 
:see them in the New Testament. By every analogy which we 
Tinow, the two ways of human life that Jesus pointed out,— one 
broadleading to loss,the other narrow but to gain— extend into the 
immortal world; there, as here, each soul will pursue what it 
loves, and seek that which it enjoys. If here we learn to love 
intrigue, and power, and falsehood, and excitement, we shall 
seek them over there, as certainly as we shall seek honesty and 
puilty and j)eace. Nor do the two roads less diverge merely be- 
'Cause the beginnings of divergence are often imperceptible 

The finite cannot comprehend the infinite. We are to judge of 
what is to come by what is,— not by the goodness of God. Any 
-theologian could prove from the goodness of God, that no such 
world as this could ever be,— that no such thing as evil or im- 
perfection could exist; but facts would refute him. We can 
-only reason from what is, to prove in the first place the good- 
ness of God. In this life we see good men sometimes become 
evil, and evil men break off and grov/ good. I know of no war- 
rant for saying that those who continue to increase in evil dur- 
ing this life will increase in evil forever: or that those who here 
increase in good will so increase forever. We may speculate, 
but conjecture is not knowledge. We know the tendency; we 
know the momentum of habit is such that Christ's words are 
true, that there is danger in one way, safety in the other. All 
aieroic and consecrated effort is based on the possibility of being 



8 APPENDIX. 

overcome by temptation, and the counter possibility of overcom- 
ing, and experiencing the ineffible glory. . . . 

If eternity has no finality, we cannot speak of "svhat will final- 
ly happen. . . . Tlie doctrine that the righteous and the wicked 
are to be assembled and separated,— the righteous Mx^looined to 
heaven, and the wicked sentenced and driven to everlasting tor- 
ments,— is probably an error made, originally by interpreting cer- 
tain expressions too literally. . . . The awful fact is not that God 
ever sentences a man to be where he does not wish to be, but 
that a human being should ever choose dark and debased sur- 
roimdings. . . . Christ has sometimes been spoken of as carry- 
ing in his person the sins of the whole worle. He evidently car- 
ried upon his spirit a load of mountain weight. But we may 
reasonably say it was a clear and sympathetic percei>iion of the 
two kinds of life i^ossible to man; of the joy, peace and glory 
consequent upon the one, and the unrest, remorse, and darkness 
attendant upon the other. . . . No feebler terms than •'hell" 
and '' condemnation" '< heaven " and "joy of the Lord" could 
fully express his idea of the destinations. . . . 



For an eloquent confirmation of the foregoing views of Hu- 
man Destiny, see Horace Greeley's essay on "Reforms and Re- 
formers," in the Appendix of his " Recollections of a Busy Life," 
page 524 : " Who shall say that Nebuchadnezzar on his throne is 
happier than Daniel in his prison? " &c. 



A VOICE FEOM THE PEWS. 



I. 

REASON AND REVELATION. 

Well ! but one may decline your invitation for the 
very reason that he is not ' 'thoughtless e" He may 
fear that he will put himself in a false light. He may 
see the subjective benefit of prayer, and honestly 
fail to appreciate the objective theory. Until your 
exhortation is more explicitly qualified, to "step 
forward" will seem to indorse all jou. imply about 
Adam's fall, a personal devil, a Trinity-council and 
covenant, imputed righteousness, and carnal reason. 
But 3^our kindness entitles 3'ou to mine. Moreover, 
I want your good work to be permanent. The objec- 
tion that "it is a mere transient excitement" ought 
to be without any foundation w^hatever. 

Come, then, and let us reason together. Neither 
of us, I trust, is a being to whom Reason is an 
abomination. "Reason," says Bishop Butler, "is 
the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concern- 
ing anything, even Revelation itself. Its duty in 
relation to the Scriptures is to judge not whether 
they contain things different from what we should 
have expected from a wise, just and good Being, but 



2 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

whether they contain things plainly contradictory to 
wisdom, justice and goodness" as elsewhere taught 
us of God. 

And here let us not confound absurdities with 
mysteries, — what opposes reason with what sur- 
passes it. The latter we must always revere, the 
former, never. Why wince at having a line drawn 
between Faith and credulity somewhere? Why be 
intolerantly unpleased at Park Benjamin's tolerant 

pleasantry : 

*' Great f aitli it needs, according to my view, 
To trust in tliat wliicli never could be true." 

Especially if we sa}^ amen to the sentiment : 

" On argument alone our faith is built. 
Fond as we are, and justly fond of faith, 
Reason, we grant, demands our first regard. 
Reason, the root, fair faith is but the flower ' 
The fading flower may die, but reason lives, 
Immortal like our Father in the skies." 

Fortunatei}^, however, the remark of President 
Jefferson to Dr. Priesth' is less applicable to church- 
folk of the present da}^ than to infant-brimstoners, 
namel}^ that from their ratiocinative indolence, or 
from views of personal interest, the most eloquent 
Teacher, the most benevolent character, and the most 
sublime system that ever was upon earth, had been 
so disfigured as to be rejected by the unthinking part 
of mankind. Now-a-days, if a clergyman would 
compromise his prestige for common sense, he has 
only to hurl the cheap epithet ' ' Infidel ! " at eveiy- 
body who assents to Leonard Swett's comment on 
President Lincoln : 

"He believed in the existence of a God as the 
author and ruler of the universe, in Jesus Christ as 



REASON AND REVELATION. 6 

the teacher and example, and in the immortality of 
the soul. He believed in the growth and develop- 
ment of mankind by the practice of virtue, and in 
the dwarfing and deteriorating effects of vice. Car- 
rying such convictions into his daily life, he prac- 
ticed the golden rule, and lived himself a life of self- 
denial and personal purity. He placed upon his fel- 
low man, for his benefit, no yoke, and so far as lay 
in his power would permit no one else to do it. He 
lent to every man he ever met a helping hand, and 
walked through life with malice toward none and 
charity for all. If such a man is not a christian, 
surely must every christian be improved by becom- 
ing such a man."* 

* others than Jew, Christian, or " Infidel" have made this chris- 
tian— or Buddhist— philosophy their <<BI0r KYBEPNHTHS." 
Take, for instance, the words of Horace, (Odes, iv. 9,) who 
died B.C. 9: 

Non possidentem multa vocaveris 

Recte beatuni: rectius occupat 
Nomen beati, qui deorum 
Muneribus sapienter uti, 
Duramque callet iDauperium pati, 

Pej usque leto flagitium timet; 
Non ille pro caris amicis 
Autpatri perire. 
Whereof Sir Henry Wotton's hymn would serve as a translation: 
(Sir Henry flourished before Paley's "Proposition II.") 
How happy is he born or taught, 

Who serveth not another's will ; 
Whose armor is his honest thought, 

And simple truth his highest skill : 
Whose passions not his masters are ; 

AVhose soul is still prepared for death; 
Not tied unto the world with care 

Of prince's ear or vulgar breath: 
Who God doth late and early pray 

More of his grace than goods to lend, 
And walks with man from day to day. 

As with a brother and a friend. 
This man is freed from servile bands 

Of hope to rise, or fear to fall. 
Lord of himself, though not of lands, 
And having nothing,— yet hath all. 



4 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Not an unpractical or unpopular definition of Re- 
ligion is, that it is morality heightened by emotion. 
An}^ preacher "svho attempts to divorce morality from 
religion is likely to meet the smile of some hearer 
that is thinking of the recent experience of a col- 
ored missionary in Louisiana, who finding his flock 
forgetful of the moral law, began to give them a se- 
ries of discourses on lying and stealing. They 
stood it for a Sunday or two and then revolted, a 
deacon addressing him thus: ''Vv^e like 3'ou ber}^ 
much, and we want to make it comf'ble for 3'ou. 
But de fac is, 3'ou see, we don't like dis preaching 
about lyin' and stealin' ; we must hab our Sundays 
for 'Ugion.'' 

As a rule, goodness is so attractive that one loves 
to assent to whatever a good man says ; the excep- 
tional dissent comes when he is suspected of being 
crotchety and irrational. It is when you assert un- 
qualifiedh^ that the whole Bible is infallible and in- 
spired, that 3'ou do yourself injustice, and defeat 
your grand and holy purpose. Whatever of supple- 
ment I may suggest is with an earnest desire to pro- 
mote '-Salvation," but in the uncontracted sense of 
that very trite word. Soundness of seed is the first 
essential to the sower's product. However often 
and flippantly '^-bold unbelief," (in the theologically 
technical sense of the term,) is declaimed against, 
there is another mischief : 

''The fault that saps the Ufe 
Is doubt half crushed, half v^elled ; the lip assent 
Which finds no echo in the heart of iiearts." 



REASON AND REVELATION. 5 

All moral teaching worthy of the name, whether 
in the Bible or elsewhere, — addresses itself to the 
consciousness of those to whom it speaks. Onl}^ as 
it proves an interpreter of floating and partially 
formed thought, or is the expression of feelings be- 
fore but dimly recognized or understood, does any 
book produce impressions of much real value. The 
softened heart responds to words which awake no 
echo in other breasts. Without affinity there can be 
no assimilation ; without moral sympathy there can 
be no spiritual reproduction. The sheep know the 
voice of the Good Shepherd. Everybody is "In 
quest,"* but an earlier inspired One than Whittier 
has testified "few there be that find." 

We conclude, then, it is the pure in heart who are 
blessed with discernment of the pure and eternal 
verities : just as it is the lover of music who catches 
melody and harmony ; the lover of fun who appre- 
ciates the humor of Dickens ; the lover of S3'mpa- 
th}^ — the unfortunate — who fathoms the pathos of 

* "The riddle of the world is understood 

Only by him who feels that God is good, 

As only he can feel who makes his love 

The ladder of his faith ; and climbs above 

On th' rounds of his best instincts : draws no line 

Between mere human goodness and divine, 

But judging God by what in him is best, 

With a child's trust leans on a father's breast, 

And hears unmoved the old creeds babble still 

Of kingly power and dread caprice of will, 

Chary of blessing, prodigal of curse, 

The pitiless doomsman of the universe. 

Can hatred ask for love ? Can selfishness 

Invite to self denial? Is he less 

Than man in kindly dealing? Can he break 

His own great law of fatherhood, forsake 

And curse his children ? Not for earth and heaven 

Can separate tables of the law be given. 

No rule can bind which He himself denies; 

The truths of time are not eternal lies." 



6 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Shakespeare. Reason, combined with the good-will 
essential to fair-mindedness, (or with a "holy spir- 
it,'' if you prefer the expression,) constitutes the 
verifying faculty for sifting and appropriating the 
good-inspired portions of any writings, — the Bible 
not excepted. 



II. 

LITERAL INSPIRATION. 

Again : Let us see how further we can go along 
together. Had Paul told Timothy^ that everything 
which was in writing was ''God-breathed/' we 
might without irreverence declare the statement to 
be true only in a restricted sense. But, as in con- 
struing wills and statutes, every presumption is to 
be taken in favor of general consistency, and as 
Paul quoted from the Septuagint, which probably in- 
cluded some of the apocrypha, I A^enture to assume 
that you favor the version given by Drs. A. Clark, 
S. Davidson, Yon Tischendorf, and others, namel}^ : 
"Every scripture inspired b}' God is also profitable 
for doctrine, for conviction, for rectification, for dis- 
cipline which is in righteousness, that the man of God 
may be complete," &c. He might not have meant 
to include the merely historical, however true and 
useful ; genealogies, however important in their 
place ; poems or proverbs, however wise, which are 
but expressions of human experience ; references 
to physical phenomena ordinarily expressed in col- 
loquial language ; and all acts or utterances which 
are not in accordance with the temper of Jesus. 
From these, indeed, a devout mind can draw profit- 

* II Timothy, iii. IG. 



8 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

able instruction ; so it can find "sermons in stones," 
but this fact does not make the stones inspired. 

To cite a few instances: none of the "judges" 
were "perfect before God." Samson's conduct 
speaks for itself. Gideon kills Zeba and Zalmunna, 
saving he would have saved them alive if they had 
not killed his brothers.* The motives and conduct 
of Jeptha and Gideon, Deborah and Barak, fall far 
below the Christian standard. Samuel was liable to 
eiT. David is said to have caused the Gibeonites to 
hang the seven sons of Saul "before the Lord.^f 
Nor does all this interfere with the declaration of 
the partisan Hebrew (probably Apollos,) that 
"through faith they subdued kingdoms, wrought 
righteousness, obtained promises and (figuratively) 
stopped the mouths of lions. "J Great faith, in one 
sense of the term, is not unfrequently accompanied 
— especially in warriors — by great defects of moral 
character. The prayer, § "let his [one's enemy's] 
children be vagabonds and beg continuall}'," is un- 
questionabl}" unchristian. 

The apostles, then, do not claim that Scripture is 
a thing of the letter rather than of the spirit. To 
any such pretension the least flaw in expression 
w^ould be fatal ; translation would be destruction. 
They quote the sense rather than the exact words. 
Parables and other figures often express truth more 
fully and completel}^ than could any literal and pure- 

* Judges, viii. 19. t n. Sam. xxi. 9. t Heb. xi. 32. § Ps. cix. 10. 



LITERAL INSPIRATION. 9 

ly syllogistic statement. A mere good mathemati- 
cian makes a poor advocate, judge, or cabinet min- 
ister, — so Napoleon testifies. 

And right here must be made a concession. Crit- 
ics who ''stick in the bark'* fancy the Bible to be 
full of contradictions. Many alleged discrepancies 
are more apparent than real. Let us here give 
these a summary consideration. I am indifferent 
whether you sa}^ that the "bow" in heaven first be- 
came visible after the flood, or whether that, previ- 
ously existing, it was only appropriated as the token 
of some covenant ; whether literally men thought to 
build a tower that should reach unto heaven, or 
whether an alleged ' ' city and tower" were symboli- 
cal of an attempted centralization ; whether the con- 
fusion of tongues was decretal and special, or some- 
thing figurative of the tendency of language to dia- 
lection. 

Indeed, who can tell how far our differences of 
impression and opinion are due to deficiencies of ex- 
pression ? A familiar instance is the manifold ideas 
of God.* Or take this very word ''Inspiration." 

*<'Who dare express Him? 

And who profess him, 
Saying : I believe in Him ! 

Who, feeling, seeing, 
Deny His being. 

Saying: I believe Him not! 
The All-enfolding, 

The All-ui)holding, 
Folds and upholds he not 

Thee, me. Himself? 
Arches not there the sky above us? 

Lies not beneath us firm the earth? 
And rise not on us shining 

Friendly the everlasting stars ? 



10 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

With all my effort to treat it from 3'our own stand- 
point, you must perceive my own idea is a sort of 
'' cross betwixt" all of the lexicographer's four trop- 
ical difinitions, — the four derived b}^ various usage 
from the two literal ones, of ''drawing in air" and 
"breathing into." Yet this does not reallj^ yslyj 
much from the second part of Webster's third defi- 
nition : "'or the communication of the divine will to 
the understanding by suggestions or impressions on 
the mind which leave no room to doubt the reality of 
their supernatural origin." "Don't you think," — 
propounds the physician in Dr. Holmes' " Elsie Yen- 
ner" to the doctor of divinit}^ who had quoted St. 
Paul on " opposition of science," — " don't you think 
the inspiration of the Almighty gave Newton and 
Cuvier 'understanding'? . . . You are clear I sup- 
pose, that the Omniscient spoke through Solomon, 
but that Shakespeare wrote without his help" ? 

Far be it from me to intimate that there is in Jew- 
ish history or in any mythology anything that is abso- 
lutely bad and worthless. Every legend, — as for 



Look I not eye to eye on thee, 

And feel' St not, thronging 
To head and heart, the force, 

Still weaving its eternal secret, 
Invisible, visible, round thy life? 

Vast as it is, fill with that force thy heart. 
And when thou in the feeling wholly blessed art, 

Call it then what thou wilt,— 
Call it Bliss ! Heart ! Love ! God ! 

I have no name to give it ! 
Feeling is all in all : 

The name is sound and smoke, 
Obscuring Heaven's clear glow." 
Goethe in "Faust:" J. B. Taylor's translation, page 221. 



LITERAL INSPIRATION. 11 

instance those of the labors of Hercules — had some 
germ of truth.* Sir Walter Scott has demonstrated 
to what a beautiful poetic use may be put the tradi- 
tion of the cloud-pillar ; namely, in Rebecca's hymn 

in ''Ivanhoe :" 

"Yfhen Israel of the Lord beloved," 

AYhat I would affirm is that the manifold means 
and ends for ascertainment and encouragement in 
the performance of human duties are not all of 
equal value ; that in a collection of writings b}^ va- 
rious scribes of different centuries some passages are 
of a value therefor subordinate to that of others ; 
and that when the prima facie meaning of any pas- 
sage is opposed to actually demonstrated knowledge, 
our first impression thereof may, without irreverence, 
accept modification. Methinks w^hen in the dying 
hand of Copernicus was placed the first printed cop}^ 
of his work "On the Revolutions of the Celestial 

* " Hans told us a wonderful story of Buddha giving himself to 
a famished tigress to save her and "her little ones from starving. 
And he said you were like Buddha. That is what we all imagine 
of you." 

<' Pray don't imagine that," said Deronda, when ''Buddha let the 
tigress eat him he might have been very hungry himself." 

" Perhaps if he was starved lie would not mind so much about 
being eaten," said Mab, shyly. 

''Please don't think that Mab ; it takes away the beauty of the 
action," said Mirah. 

"But if it were true, Mirah?" said the rational Amy; "you 
always take what is beautiful as if it were true." 

" So it is," said Mirah, gently. "If people have thought what 
is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is al- 
ways there ; it is a truth in thought though it may never have 
been carried out in action, — it lives as an idea." 

" But tt^as it beautiful for Buddha to let the tiger eat him?" 
said Amy, changing her ground. " It would be a bad pattern." 

"The world would get full of fat tigers," said Mab. 

Deronda laughed but defended the myth. "It is like a passion- 
ate word," he said; " the exaggeration is a flash of fervor. It is 
an extreme image of what is happening every day — the trans- 
mutation of self."— George Elliot. 



12 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Orbs," he not at all repented of having written to 
his friend, the Pope : ^^ If there be anj' who, though 
ignorant of mathematics, shall presume to judge 
concerning them, and dare to condemn this treatise 
because the}' fancy it is inconsistent with some pas- 
sages of Scripture, the sense of which they have 
miserably perverted, I regard them not, but despise 
their rash censure." 



III. 

INCONGRUITIES NOT DISCREPANCIES. 

Again we may agree. In adverting to II. Timothy, 
iii. 16, we have already seen that our King James 
Bible is not without errors of translation. Referring 
you to Dr. S. Davidson's learned "Introduction," 
for further illustrations, I shall content myself with 
citing only one more instance, the story of Jeptha's 
daughter, to show that the mischief of such defects 
may extend to the adoption of an absurdity. In 
Judges xi. 30, the Hebrew vav should be trans- 
lated '^or," as it often is, elsewhere; the passage 
should read "or I will offer it up for a burnt offer- 
ing." Jeptha did not slay his daughter, but only 
dedicated her to perpetual virginity to serve in the 
tabernacle. He knew that the sacrifice of human 
beings was prohibited by the Mosiac law. In an 
interval of two months the priests would have inter- 
vened to prevent the barbarous deed. 

Many seeming discrepancies are attributable to a 
difference in the dates of the discordant passages. 
Some refer to a state of society where slavery, po- 
l3^gamy and private revenge were lawful, and where 
the rules of duty were strictly drawn only as to sins 
deemed more highly dishonorable to God and inju- 
rious to the welfare of men. But in the New Testa- 



14 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

ment, one who is careful not to swear falsely but 
unscrupulous as to speaking falsely is not ' 'good." 
The gist of sin is the evil thought ; the act is quite 
a subordinate matter. Others are attributable to 
differences of authorship. One writer may indorse, 
another merely narrate a statement, and a third aim 
only to grasp the ground thought. One may state a 
fact according to the oral tradition of his time and 
neighborhood, another according to another report. 
Thus one* puts the census of Joab at 800,000 Israel 
xmd 500,000 Judah ; anothert at 1,100,000 Israel 
and 470,000 Judah. 

Others arise from differences of stand-point or of 
object on the part of the respective authors. The 
role of the historian, unlike that of the moralist, is 
a neutral one ; only the latter is amenable to the 
tribunal of ethics for the correctness of his praise 
or censure. Moreover, the sayings of the latter 
ma}^ seem to conflict with each other w^hen lying in 
different planes of thought, or contemplating different 
ends. Thus Bacon's ''Christian Paradoxes" make 
the pious man lose his life to save it ; a peacemaker, 
yet a continual fighter ; fearing always, yet bold as 
a lion ; a freeman, though a servant ; loving not 
honor among men, 3'et prizing a good name. 

Others arise from different methods of arrange- 
ment, whether chronological, logical, or typograph- 
ical. Some writers more than others may adapt 
-their expressions to prevalent opinions and custom- 



*n. Sam., xxiv. 9. 1 1. Chron., xxi. 5. 



INCONGRUITIES NOT DISCREPANCIES. 15 

ary forms of speech. We speak of "sunrise" and 
"sunset" without astronomical precision. By the 
battle of Banker Hill we mean the battle fought on 
Breed's Hill. 

Other incongruities arise from different modes of 
reckoning. Of the thermometer 100 degrees Cen- 
tigrade means 80 Reaumur, and 212 Fahrenheit. 
Sometimes only round numbers are given, as in 
Ezra, ii. 69, where the gifts were 5000 lbs. of silver 
and 100 garments ; the precise number in Nehemiah 
vii. 70-72, being 4700 lbs. silver, (500 and 2200 
and 2000,) and 97 garments, (30 and 67.)* The 
50 shekels of silver in II. Sam. xxiv. 24, were paid 
for the floor and oxen ; the 600 shekels of gold in 
I. Chron,, xxi. 25, were paid "for the place." A 
farm may have been bought for $1000 ; the owner 
after making additions and improvements may say 
his "place" has cost him $5000. Gray mentions 
240 "bones" in the human body; Wilson, 246, — 
each is right, according to his own ideas of a 
"bone." 

Others arise from the peculiar oriental use of met- 
aphor and hyperbole. Isaiah speaks of God as a 
"bridegroom," t David as a "rock," J and else- 
where as having wings and feathers. § Others arise 
from a plurality of names. Thus Gesenius gives 
eight different Hebrew terms for "counsel," twelve 
for "darkness," ten for "law," twenty-three for 
"wealth," and thirty-two for "destruction." 

*Tlie 6100 drams of gold in Ezra is probably a copyist's mis- 
take ; the amount in Nehemiah footing up at 4100 drams, 
t Is. Ixii. 5. t rs. xlii. 9. § Ps. xci. 4. 



16 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Others arise from using the same word with 
au opposite signification. Our word ''door" some- 
times means the opening, and sometimes the s\ying- 
ing valve which closes that opening. A cook 
''stones" raisins, but not as a boy "stones" an ap- 
ple-tree. To "let" once meant both to permit and 
to hinder. The Latin sacer means both holy and 
accursed. The Hebrew saqual means both to 
jDclt with stones and to free from stones ; barak, 
both to bless and to curse ; naker^ to know and 
not to know ; yarash^ to possess and to dis- 
possess. 

Multitudes of discrepances arise from errors in 
the manuscripts. Printing was not used until the 
fifteenth century. In ancient Hebrew, letters were 
probably used for numerals. The distinctions be- 
tween man}' pairs of the letters are so minute as to 
consist merely in the acuteness or obtuseness of an 
angle, or the length or straightness of a line, — as 
between the Greek small Nu and Upsilon. Thus 
the 30,000 men for the ambuscade in Josh. viii. 3, 
should be 5,000 as in verse 12.* In man}" manu- 
scripts the "50,000" is omitted in I Sam. vi. 19; 
leaving only 70 men of the little village of Beth- 
shemesh slain for looking into the ark. In II. 
Chron. xxii. 2, the copyist in making the age of 
Ahaziah of Judah forty-two, instead of twenty- 



*0r verses 12 and 13 not being in the Septuagint, may be 
regarded as a marginal note winch has crept into the text. 



INCONGRUITIES NOT DISCREPANCIES. 17 

two as in II. Kings viii. 26, doubtless mistook one 
numeral letter for another. f 

This cause of discrepancies, namely, liabilit}^ ta 
error in copying manuscripts, combined with the 
liability to error in the original reporter in matter 
gathered from oral tradition rather than from his 
own observation, demands careful and candid atten- 
tion. St. Luke is by no means the only writer 
whose proper prologue must be : Forasmuch as- 
many have taken in hand to set forth a declaration 
of things which actual witnesses told them of, TIL 
make a statement to help remedy thy uncertaint}^^ 
my good Theophilus. 

Of the five principal manuscripts of the Greek 
New Testament, the oldest, namely, the Vatican, 
was written about A. D. 325 ; the Sinai tic, about 
the same time ; the Alexandrian, about A. D. 350; 
the Ephraim, a little later ; and the Beza, about A. 
D. 490. Whether any of these writers copied from 
the original manuscripts written by the apostles and 
their scribe-disciples or from copies of the originals, 
cannot now be ascertained. In the collation of the 
manuscripts for Griesbach's edition of the New Tes- 
tament, about 150,000 various readings were discov- 
ered. These, however, are all said to pertain to 
minor matters, so that no duty is rendered obscure 
or doubtful. The fact that several passages are in 
our King James version which are not in the oldest 

t So also in i. Kings xxii. 51, where Ahab is made to die in the 
seventeenth year of Jehosaphat, instead of the nineteenth, a3 
in verse 41 compared with xvi. 29. 



18 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

manuscripts * and are generally conceded to be opin- 
ions, does not at all mar the the general character 
of the Bible, so but that chancellor Kent's words are 
true : '* The general diffusion of the Bible is the 
most effectual w^ay to civilize and humanize man- 
kind ; to purify and exalt the general system of pub- 
lic morals ; to give efficacy to the just precepts of 
international and municipal law ; to enforce the ob- 
servance of prudence, temperance, justice and forti- 
tude ; and to improve all the relations of social and 
domestic life." Or the words of Lord Chief Justice 
Hale: '' There is no book like the Bible for excel- 
lent learning, wisdom, and use." But these words 
must not be construed to mean more than their au- 
thors intended. Thus the language of Sir Isaac 
Newton, accounting the scriptures to be ''the most 
sublime philosoph}^," and to exhibit "more sure 
marks of authenticity than any profane history 
whatever," are no assertion that everything in the 
canon can be proved to be authentic. Newton 
would be the last person to ignore the fact that evi- 
dence has three degrees of force : plausibility, prob- 
ability, and demonstration. It is one thing to af- 
firm that the Bible contains more of the infallible 
element than any other book ; and quite another to 
declare it infallible. 

In conclusion, then, without asserting that there 
are no irreconcilable discrepancies in the Bible, we 
may safely observe with Dr. Townsend f that many 

*E. g., that in Italics, (i. John v.,) concerning the tlu*ee wit- 
nesses, t "Credo," page 91. 



INCONGRUITIES NOT DISCREPANCIES. 19 

an apparent one is but ' ' as the idle ripple of a single 
loave among the pebbles^ when every wave moves in the 
same direction,^' % 

% The reader is ref ered to an excellent work to wMch the wri- 
ter is much indebted. ''Alleged Discrepancies " &c. by J. W. Ha- 
ley, D. D. Andover, Mass. n. F. Draper, pp. 473. 



THE FORMATION OF THE CANON. 

Again : we shall not differ materially as to the 
history of the canon ; for our sources of information 
are probably the same. Let us then briefl}^ gather 
and summarize. 

As to the Old Testament canon, the nucleus was 
the "book of the law," mentioned* as discovered by 
Hilkiah and read by Shaphan, in the time of Josiah, 
about B.C. 650. This *' book" was probably Deu- 
teronomy ; the ' ' evils and troubles" f being evidentl}'' 
those when ''the line of Samaria and the plummet 
of the house of Ahab" I were threatening Jerusa- 
lem and Judah ; Israel having already gone to ruin. 
Around Deuteronomy the rest of the Pentateuch and 
the story of Joshua's conquest gathered. This con- 
stituted the Thora, or "book of the law," read by 
Ezra§ under Nehemiah's restoration, about' B. C. 
650. To that collection man}' an old book had 
given up its treasures, and then itself vanished for- 
ever. The Maccabean historian tells us || that Ne- 
hemiah brought together the things concerning the 
kings (the books of Judges. Samuel and Kings) and 
the prophets, (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the 
twelve minor prophets,) and David's things, (the 

*In II. Chron., xxxiv. 14-32, and ii. Kings, xxii., xxiii. t Deut., 
xxxi. 17. t II. Kings, xxi. 13. § Neli. viii. 1-18. || ii. Mac. ii. 13. 



THE FORMATION OF THE CANON. 21 

Psalms,) and the letters of kings about offerings.* 
He then saj^sf that Judas [Maccabeus] brought 
together in addition all the things that were lost by 
reason of the war, and they remain, &c. These 
were probably the then recent book of Daniel, the 
old poem Job, the Proverbs, Ethics and Canticles, 
collected chiefly under Solomon's auspices, Esther, 
Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles. They constitute 
the ''Ketubim," or "writings," mentioned by the 
translator of Ecclesiaticus, and are the third division 
of the Hebrew Bible ; the '' Thora" or Law, and the 
" Nebiim" or Prophets being the two others. 

During the two centuries between Judas Macca- 
beus and the fall of Jerusalem, materials for a fourth 
instalment of scriptures accumulated and found 
their way into the Greek Bible, such as Baruch, To- 
bit, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and the additions to 
Daniel and Esther. The -Ethiopian Bible preserved 
the Book of Enoch, which is quoted in Jude, 14, as 
if a genuine prophecy. The word ''resurrection" 
first appears in the Apocrypha. 

The New Testament canon was delivered by the 
two Synods of Carthage, the first held A. D. 397, 
the second, A. D. 419. St. Jerome, who died A. D. 
420, published in A. D. 383 a Latin version of the 
four Gospels, with a prefatory letter to the Pope, 
stating that the custom of the Latin Christians does 
not receive the Epistle to the Hebrews among the 
canonical scriptures, nor that of the Greek churches 

*E. g. the gift of King Sileucus Ji. Mac. iii. 3. t ii. Mac. ii, 14. 



22 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

John's Apocalypse. Of the so-called Second Epis- 
tle of Peter he sa3's : ' ' It is denied b}' most to be 
his." Of the Epistle of James he says: "It is 
asserted to have been brought out b}" somebody else 
under his name." As to Jude : "Inasmuch as the 
author appeals to the Book of Enoch, which is apoc- 
lyphal, the Epistle is rejected b}^ most." And two 
of the three epistles attributed to St. John Jerome 
says "are asserted to be b}^ John the Elder." The 
two S^^nods appear to have been more earnest than 
critical ; for the}" imagined that Wisdom and Eccle- 
siasticus are by Solomon, although Wisdom was 
composed in Greek hardl}' half a century before the 
Christian era. St. Augustine, who died A. D. 430, 
says : " I receive the Gospel onh^ upon the authority 
of the Catholic Church." Eusebius, who died A. D, 
340, says* that Scriptures were current, "put forth 
by the heretics in the name of the Apostles, whether 
as containing the Gospels of Peter and Thomas and 
Matthias, or those also of any others besides these, 
or as containing the acts of Andrew and John and 
the other Apostles." But he accepts the four Gos- 
pels. So also does Origen, who died A. D. 254, and 
Irenaeus, who wrote about A. D. 180. But neither 
Ignatius, Poljxarp, nor Justin Martyr testify on this 
precise point. Papias, about A. D. 140, said he pre- 
ferred "things from the living and abiding voice ;" 
meaning probabh' speakers who had heard the voice 
of Jesus. Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Hegesippus 

* Eccl. Hist. iii. 25. 



THE FORMATION OP THE CANON. 23 

quote from the Gospel of the Hebrews, an Armaic 
copy of which Jerome found in Syria and translated. 
This Gospel mentions that a light was seen on Jor- 
dan at Christ's baptism; that Christ appeared to 
James, (as recorded by Paul, but not in the Four ;) 
and that Jesus said : "Handle me and see, for I am 
not a bodiless ghost/^ The first epistle of Clement 
]s included in the Alexandrian manuscript. The 
manner in which he and his cotemporaries quote 
shows that there was no settled canon of the Gospels 
in the earlier half of the second century. Thus we 
see, the record ivhen we first get it has passed through 
at least half a century of oral tradition^ and through 
more than one written account. 



JOHN AND HIS GNOSTIC REDACTOR. 

But then a topic is reached ^\'hereon our views may 
differ.* There is clear internal evidence that even 
if the original disciples always understood the saj^- 
Ings of Christ, their successors have often labored 
«nder misconceptions. Take, for example, the 
Fourth Gospel. That some such Gospel existed as 
early as A. D. 125, appears from the " Philosoph- 
-umena," (written A. D. 201-219,) which gives quo- 
tations therefrom by Basileides and other Gnostics, 
between A. D. 125 and 150. But that Gospel was 
probabl}' not a canonical one to Justin Martyr in A. 
D. 147 ; otherwise he could not have misquoted there- 
from Christ's words as to the new birth. But John 
was a Jew, and it would be a ver}^ unnatural and 
violent presumption to suppose that the following 
passages (quoting from the Vatican MS.) were writ- 
ten by a Jew : "as the manner of the Jews is to 
bury ;" •' because of the preparation of the Jews ;'' 
''after the manner of the purifying of the Jews;" 
"there arose a question between some of John's dis- 
ciples, and a Jew about purifying." For a Jew 
so to speak would be like an Englishman's talking 

*i^nd here, asunder tlie last topic, my acknowledgments are 
-^ilue to older Biblical students than myself, especially to Mat- 
thew Arnold. See his late work •' God and the Bible;" London: 
^mith, Elder & Co. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co. 



JOHN AND HIS GNOSTIC REDACTOR. 25 



I 

^K about the English people's Derb}^, or a Yankee's 
^m telling you he had seen an American's Fourth of 
^m July. • Again, twice the writer speaks of Caiaphas 
^m as " high-priest of that year ; " but the high-priest- 
^^^B hood was not a yearly office. It is like saying ''Mr. 
^m Pierce was president of that j^ear." A lowly disci- 
^^ pie is represented as having ingress to a grandee's 
palace and being ''an acquaintance of the high- 
priest." Not only the social but the geographical 
distinctions of Palestine are confounded. "Beth- 
any beyond Jordan," is like Ogdensburg beyond the 
St. Lawrence. This mistake of the three earlier 
manuscripts was corrected in later ones by putting 
"Bethabara" for " Bethan^^," as it stands in our 
version. A hyssop stalk with its bunch of flowers 
w^ould itself serve as a sponge, without any addition, 
as in John xix. 29. The last supper (xviii. 28,) is 
placed on the thirteenth of Nisan, instead of the 
fourteenth as the Synoptics relate. But John kept 
the fourteenth. 

Again, the lofty strain of the prologue is nearl}^ 
inconceivable as that of a Galilean fisherman ; at 
least, unless we cut loose from the probable, and 
dodge into the realm of the supernatural. The form 
in wiiich the Fourtli Gospel presents its ideas is 
Greek, — a style flowing, ratiocinative, articulated. 
Gnostic ideas are handled in the introduction with 
all the ease and breadth which we find in the mas- 
ters of Greek Gnosticism. 
The tradition which (as Eusebius, the early eclesi- 



26 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

astical liistorian, avers) accredits the Fourth Gospel 
to the Apostle John, says that John was moved by 
liis friends to give his recollections. And Epipha- 
nins alleges that John wrote rekictlantly at the age of 
ninety ; both accounts importing that John's friends 
had a hand in the work. This view is confirmed by 
John, xxi. 23: ''We know his [John's] testimony 
is true ;" and xix. 35 : " That man knoweth that he 
saith true." The composer of a work would hardl}^ 
refer to himself so strangely. 

The facts of the case, then, are probabl}^ as fol- 
lows : In his old age, St. John, at Ephesus, has 
logia^ '' Sayings of the Lord," and has incidents in 
the Lord's story, vrhich have not been published in 
any of the written accounts that were beginning at 
that time to be handed about. The elders of Ephe- 
sus — whom tradition afterwards makes into apostles, 
fellows of St. John — move him to bestow his treas- 
ure on the world. He gives his materials, and the 
presbyter}^ of Ephesus provides a redaction for them 
and publishes them. The redaction, with its unity 
of tone, its flowingness and connectedness, is by one 
single hand ; — the hand of a man of literar}' talent, 
a Greek christian, whom the church of Ephesus 
found proper for such a task ; a man of soul also, a 
theologian. A theological lecturer, perhaps, as in 
the Fourth Gospel he so often shows himself, — an 
earlier and a nameless Origen ; who in this one 
short composition produced a work outweighing all 
the folios of all the Fathers, but was content that 



JOHN AND HIS GNOSTIC REDACTOR. li 

his name should be written only in the Book of Life. 
Yet the Gospel is John's, because its whole value is 
in the logia^ sayings of the Lord which it saves ; and 
by John these logia were furnished. But at the be- 
ginning of the second century when the w^ork ap- 
peared, there would be many who knew well that the 
redaction was not John's. Therefore the church of 
Ephesus, which published the work, gave to it that 
solemn and singular imprimatur: "He who hath 
seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true ; and 
that man knoweth that he saith true, that ye may 
believe." The Johannine Gospel was read with love 
and respect ; but for at least fifty years, it remained, 
like the three others, liable to changes, interpola- 
tions, additions ; until at last, like them, towards 
the end of the second century, by ever increasing 
use and veneration, it passed into the settled state 
of Holy Scripture. 

The Johannine author has new logia or sayings 
of the Lord at his disposal; and he has some nevf 
incidents. But his treasure is the logia ^ and the im- 
portant matter for him is to plant his logia. The 
narrative, skipping so unaccountably' backwards and 
forwards between Galilee and Jerusalem, might well 
be thought but a matter of infinitely little care to 
him, — a mere slight framework, in which to set the 
doctrine and discourses of Jesus. It would, there- 
fore, be nothing strange if some sayings were put at 
the wrong occasion ; and some jolts occur like that 
at the end of the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters : 



28 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

"As the Father gave me commandment, even so I 
do. Arise let us go hence. I am the true vine and 
my Father is the husbandman." Or the jolt in in- 
troducing the dialogue with the woman of Samaria,* 
"Jesus, tired with his journey, sat tints by the 
well." Thus? How? There's not a word to tell us. 
The writer, probabh", had in his mind John's own 
words: "Jesus, tired with his journey, sat, as I 
have been telling you, by the well." So also,! " ^^5 
lying as I am telling you on Jesus' breast," &c. So 
also X "he manifested himself as I am going to tell 
you,^^ Another defective adjustment of context oc- 
curs§ where Jesus is said to have departed into Gal- 
ilee, " for Jesus himself, testified that a prophet hath 
no honor in his own country." That would be a rea- 
son for staying away from Galilee, not for going 
there. The writer should have prefaced John's 
words by saying : ' ' And this he did notwithstand- 
ing his own testimony." So also, as to that abrupt 
and inconsequential sentence : || "Now the passover, 
the feast of the Jews, was nigh." 

The report of the words ** "a little while and \q 
shall see me," was probably based on some imper- 
fectly understood remark of Jesus which referred 
to a spiritual rather than a ph^'sical resurrection. It 
is acknowledged, -ft that "When he was risen from 
the dead his disciples remembered that he had said" 
" Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise 
it up." No notes were taken down day by da}', as 

♦Jolmiv. G. txiii. 25. t xxi. 1. § iv. 44. ||vi. 4. **xvi.9. ttii.22. 



JOHN AND HIS GNOSTIC REDACTOR. 29 

by a Boswell. So also, as to an incident adapted 
to falfil a prophecy ; * ''When Jesus was glorified then 
remembered they that these things were written of 
him, and that they had done these things unto him." 
And again, t "As yet they knew not the scripture 
that Jie must rise again from the dead." If he had 
actually said words as reported in Luke xviii. 31-33, 
' ' they shall scourge him and put him to death and 
the third day he shall rise again," they conld not 
have been so ignorant as represented. 

The passage,:]: " on the third day I shall be per- 
fected, " is a reminiscence of Hosea vi. 2, where the 
third day means "presently." So also something 
said by Christ § about following him in regeneration 
was misapprehended by the disciples as referring to 
a sort of New Jerusalem when they "would sit upon 
twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." 

That Jesus gave the primitive themes which are 
the basis of chapters twelvth to seventeenth of the 
Fourth Gospel inclusive, that the combination of 
themes is the Evangelist's, and that by the Evange- 
list Jesus is made to repeat himself over and over 
again, to correct things as he never corrected them, 
and to say things he never said, may be regarded so 
probable that it becomes certain. For the primitive 
themes are in the characteristic manner of Jesus, 
and we do not see from whom else they can have 
proceeded. The combination, repetition and devel- 
opment of the themes are in the characteristic man- 

* John xii. 16. t xx. 9. t Luke xiii. 32. § Matt. i:ix. 28. 



30 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

ner of the Evangelist. Take, for example, the 
theme,* ''It is expedient for me, for you and the 
world that I depart." How inapt is the Evangelist's 
turn that the world would exult at Christ's death ! 
Or take the sweet and precious vrords of Jesus after 
he has washed the disciples' feet at the last supper. 
Relieve them from the separation which the Evan- 
gelist, for the purposes of his long discourse and its 
developments, inflicts on them, — simply put them 
together again, as by their subject they belong to- 
gether, — how their effectiveness and impressiveness 
increases, bow heightened is our enjoyment of them ! 
Thus if "If I, 3'our master, have washed your 
feet, 3'e also ought to wash one another's feet. For 
I have given you an example that 3'e should do as I 
have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
the servant is not greater than his lord, neither is 
he that is sent greater than he that sent him. A 
new commandment give I unto 3'ou that 3-e love one 
another ; as I have loved 3'ou, that 3'e also love 
one another. Greater love hath no man than this, 
that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are 
m3" friends if 3'e do that which I command you. Ye 
have not chosen me, but I have chosen 3'ou. Hence- 
forth I call 3'ou not servants, for the servant know- 
eth not what his lord doeth ; but 1 have called you 
friends, for all things that I hear of m3" Father I 
make known unto 3'ou. These things I command 3'ou 
that ye love one another." 

* Jolin, xiv. 28 ; xvi. 7. t John xiii. 14-16, 34, 35 : xv. 12-17. 



JOHN AND IIIS GNOSTIC REDACTOR. 31 

Again, take the words of Jesus:* "The hour is 
come that the Son of man should be glorified." In 
their utterances, texts origniall}' proper to the 
Messias-ideal of Jesus, f or to that of the Jews, | or 
to the renewed Israel § or to the righteous man in 
general, || we may conceive as present and contribu- 
tory in his mind when he saw his death imminent 
and strangers desirous to see him. But hovv^ the 
Evangelist, all through the seventeenth chapter, de- 
velops this primitive theme with one other ;** "That 
they may be one as we are one 1 " It is as much in 
character for a disciple to love to prolong the theme 
of Christ's glory and dilate upon it, as it is little in 
character for Jesus himself to do so. Jesus checked 
questions of theosophy. He contented himself with 
taking the conception of God as the Jews had it, 
and as the Old Testament delivered it, as the eter- 
nal and righteous Father ; and with saying of him- 
self : " I came forth from God." But words of self- 
glory which the Evangelist makes him say,tf are 
not at all in the manner of Jesus. Again, take 
Christ's words to Martha :J J " I am the resurection 
and the life ; he who believeth on me, though he die, 
shall live, and he who liveth and believeth on me 
shall never die." Out of that very logion w^hich 
points to a wholly new idea of resurrection, — but 
passed from hearer to hearer, brooded over, mis- 
apprehended — grew up, not improbably, the miracle 
of the raising of Lazarus. 

*John,xii. 23. t Isaiah, lii. 15. tlsaiah,xi. 10. ^Isaiah, J xU. 2. 
II Ps., Ixxiii. 24. ** John, xvii. 11, 21—23. tt xvil. 5, *24. %% xl. 25. 



"SALVATION." 

Again : * we have seen in the Old Testament, an 
immense poetry growing ronnd and investing an im- 
mortal truth, the ''secret of the Eternal:" Right- 
eousness is Salvation, We behold in the Xew, an 
immense poetry growing round and investing an im- 
mortal truth, the secret of Jesus ; He that will save 
his life shall lose it^ he that ivill lose his life^ shall 
save it. The best friends of mankind are those who 
can lead it to feel animation and hope in pres- 
ence of the religious prospect thus profoundly trans- 
formed. The way to affect this is by bringing men 
to see that our religion, in this altered view of it, 
does but at last become again that religion which 
Jesus Christ really endeavered to found, and of 
which the truth and grandeur are indestructible. It 
would do Christians generally a great injustice, to 
assume that the entire force of their Christianity lies 
in the fascination and subjugation of their spirits 
by the miracles which the}^ suppose Jesus to have 
worked, or by the material promises of heaven 
which the}^ suppose him to have offered. Far more 
does that vital force lie in the boundless confidence, 
consolation, and attachment, which the whole being 

* See ** Literature and Dogma," by Matthew Arnold. London : 
Smith, Elder & Co. Boston: James' R. Osgood & Co. 



"salvation." 33 

and discourse of Jesus inspire. What Jesus, then, 
himself thought sufficient, Christians too may bring 
themselves to accept with good courage, as enough 
for them. What Jesus himself dismissed as chi- 
merical. Christians too may bring themselves to put 
aside without disma3^ 

The central aim of Jesus was to transform for ev- 
ery religious soul the popular Messias-ideal of his 
time, the ideal of happiness and salvation of the 
Jewish people ; to disengage religion, one may sa}', 
from the materialism of the Book of Daniel. Fifty 
years had not gone by after his death, when the 
Apocalypse replunged religion in this materialism ; 
where, indeed, it was from the first manifest that re- 
plunged, by the followers of Jesus, religion must 
be. It was replunged there, but with an addition 
of inestimable value and of incalculable working, — 
the figure and influence of Jesus. Slowly this influ- 
ence emerges, transforms the turbid elements amid 
which it was thrown, brings back the imperishable 
ideal of its author. To the mind of Jesus, his own 
resurrection after a short sojourn in the grave was 
the victory of his cause after his death, and at the 
price of his death. His disciples materialized his 
resurrection ; and their version of the matter falls 
da}^ bj' day to ruin. But no ruin or contradiction 
befalls the version of Jesus himself. He has risen, 
his cause has conquered ; the course of events con- 
tinually attests his resurrection and victor^'. The 
manifest insoundness of popular Christianity in- 



34 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

clines at present man}' persons to throw doubts on 
the truth and permanence of Christianity in general. 
Creeds are discredited, religion is proclaimed to be 
in danger, the pious quake, the world laughs. Nev- 
ertheless the prince of this world is judged ; the vic- 
tory of Jesus is won and sure. Conscience and self- 
renouncement, the secret of Jesus, are set up as a 
leaven in the world, nevermore to cease workino: un- 
til the world is leavened. That this is so, that the 
resurrection and re-emergent life of Jesus are in 
this sense undeniable, and that in this sense Jesus 
himself predicted them, ma}^ in time, surelj^, encour- 
age Christians to la}' hold on this sense as Jesus 
did. 

So, too, with the hope of immortal it}'. Our com- 
mon materialistic notions about the resurrection of 
the body and the world to come are, no doubt, nat- 
ural and attractive to ordinary human nature. But 
the}' are in direct conflict with the new and loftier 
conceptions of life and death w^hich Jesus himself 
strove to establish. His secret, '' He that will save 
his life shall lose it, he that will lose his life shall 
save it,'' is of universal application. It judges, 
not only the life to which men cling here, but just as 
much, the life we love to promise ourselves in the 
new Jerusalem. The immortality propounded by 
Jesus must be looked for elsewhere than in the 
materialistic aspirations of our popular religion. 
He lived in the eternal order^ and the eternal order 
never dies: — this, if we may try to formulate in one 



" salvation" 35 

sentence the result of the sa3'ings of Jesus about 
life and death, is the sense in which, according to 
him, we can rightly conceive of the righteous man 
as immortal, and aspire to be immortal ourselves. 
And this conception w^e shall find to stand us in 
good stead when the popular materialistic version of 
our future life fails us.* So that here again, too, 
the version which, unfamiliar and novel as it may 
now be to us, has the merit of standing fast and 
holding good while other versions break down, is at 
the same time the version of Jesus. In the parable 
of the marriage feast, the conspicuous delinquent is 
sentenced to be bound hand and foot, and taken 
away, and cast into outer darkness. In the severity 

* " So to the calmly gatlierecl thought 
The innermost of truth is taught, 
The mystery dimly understood, 
That love of God is love of good. 
And, chiefly, its divinest trace 
In Him of Nazareth's holy face; 
That to be saved is only this, — 
Salvation from-our selfishness, 
From more than elemental Are 
The soul's uusanctified desire, 
From sin itself, and not the pain 
That warns us of its chafing chain ; 
That worship's deeper meaning lies 
In mercy and not sacrifice, 
Not proud humilities of sense 
And posturing of penitence, 
But love's unforced obedience; 
That Book and Church and Day are given 
For man, mot God— for earth, not heaven, — 
The blessed means to iioliest ends, 
Not masters but benignant friends; 
That the dear Christ dwells not afar 
The king of 'ome remoter star, 
Listening at times, with ilattered ear 
To homage wrung from selfish fear. 
But here amidst the poor and blind, 
The bound and sulfering of our kind, 
In works we do, in prayers we pray. 
Life of our life, he lives today." 
"Whittier: '<The Meeting." In " Among the HUls,** i&c. 



36 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

of tbis sentence, Jesus marks how utterly those who 
are gathered to his feast may fail to know him. 
The misapprehending and materializing of his relig- 
ion, the long and turbid stage of popular Christian- 
it}', even from the very moment of its birth, is, 
though inevitable, not worthy of its name ; as igno- 
rant and transient, and requiring all who would be 
trul\' children of the kingdom to rise beyond it. 

Upon the exercise, then, of the verifying faculty, 
fair-minded reason, his doctrine, however distorted 
by disciples along the stream of time, has descend -.. 
ed to us our only hope and happiness : 

"As sunshine broken by the rill, 
Though turned aside, is sunshine still." 



VII: 

V 

SUNDAY AND SABBATH. 

Possibly you dissent from Whittier's view of the 
*'day given for man, not God," as too broad a ren- 
dering of Mark ii. 29 : "The Sabbath was made for 
man, not man for the Sabbath." So I propose now 
briefly to examine the Sunday question, and shall 
therein bring to my aid anything pertinent and unde- 
niable, even though once uttered by an alleged here- 
tic, who though dead yet speaketh. 

Was the Sabbath ever known to Moses? This is 
a question not easily answered with absolute cer- 
tainty. We cannot safel}^ refer to him the whole of 
the ten commandments in any one of the three dis- 
tinct forms in which they are presented,* these be- 
ing quite different. From the time of Moses to that 
of Jehoram, a period of about six hundred years, 
there is no mention of the observance of the Sab- 
bath as a historical fact ; although in the books treat- 
ing of that period, circumcision and other national 
peculiarities are mentioned minutely. f But from 
Nehemian we learn that after the return from the 
Babylonian exile, it was kept with considerable rigor. 

* Namely, in Exodus xx., in Exodus xxxiv., and in Deut. v. 

t In II. Chron. xxxvi. 21, at a date two hundred years later than 
the time of Jehoram, the words as to fulfilling threescore and 
ten years would indicate that the Sabhath had not been kept for 
nearly five hundred years. 



38 A. VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

The nation established synagogues, \vhere the people 
freely assembled on the Sabbath and other public 
da3's, for religious instruction, and thus founded an 
excellent institution, which has shown itself fruitful 
of good results. 

When Jssus came, teaching the absolute religion, 
piety and goodness without limitation, he placed in 
ridiculous contrast the lawfulness of performing the 
rite of circumcision on the Sabbath, and the unlaw- 
fulness of curing a man of any sickness. He even 
denied the alleged ground for the original institution 
of the Sabbath,* that God had ever ceased from 
work. The new wine of Christianity could not be 
put into the old bottles of the Jews. 

After the death of Christ his followers became 
gradually divided into two parties, the Jewish and 
the Liberal Christians. Of the former, Peter and 
James vrere prominent ; and their evangelists were 
Matthew and ApoUos, who is by many critics be- 
lieved to be the author of the Gospel according to 
the Hebrews, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
They kept the whole Hebrew law, with its burden- 
some ritual ; they counted Jesus as the Messiah ot 
the Old Testament, and Christianit}', therefore, no- 
thing but Judaism brightened up and restored to its 
original purity. Thus Matthew represents Jesus as 
the Messiah giving a judicial opinion, and ruling 
that ''it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath da}'." 
Matthew makes Jesus " Lord of the Sabbath day ;" 

♦John, V. 17. 



SUNDAY AND SABBATH. 39 

entirely omitting Mark's version, that man is of 
more consequence than tlie Sabbath. Paul, who was 
at the head of the liberal part}', said, "Let no man 
judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of a holy 
day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath." * 
The spirit of Life as revealed by Jesus Christ had 
made men "free from the law of sin and death;" 
the Christians were not "subject to ordinances." 
Nor have we any proof that Paul regarded the first 
day of the week as a peculiar day. All we know 
is that in the second century the Christians pretty 
generall}^ so regarded the Sunday, making it a sym- 
bol of the new creation and of the Light that had 
come into the world. Athanasius, who wrote three 
ceniuries after Christ, gives no authority for the im- 
probable tradition that " the Lord changed this day 
from the Sabbath to the Sunday.'' 

The Christians then regarded Sunday holy only as 
New-Englanders now regard Thanksgiving Day as 
holy, — a day of religious rejoicing and feasting. On 
other days they knelt in prayer ; on the Sunday they 
stood up on joyful feet, for Light had come into the 
world. In A. D. 321, Constantine, the first Chris- 
tian Emperor of Rome, placed Sunday among the 
ferial days. Theodosius forbade certain public 
games on Sunday, and Justinian, the transaction of 
public business. So also the Christmas and Easter 
days, not from any superstitious notion, but for the 
sake of public utility and convenience. Li A. D. 

*Coloss. ii. IG. 



40 A VOICE FROM J HE PEWS. 

538, the Council of Orleans forbade labor in the 
fields, bat not traveling with cattle, on Sunda}'. 

The attempts made b}' the English government to 
enforce the observance of Sunday for purposes not 
the highest, led to a fearful reaction ; that to other 
and counter reactions. The oppression which makes 
wise men mad drove the Puritans to make Sunday a 
da}' of fear and of fasting, of trembling under the 
terrors of the Lord. They even called it by the He- 
brew name, the Sabbath. It w^as, like themselves, 
austere, inflexible as their "divine decrees;" not 
human and of man, but Hebrew and of the Jews ; 
stern, cold and sad. The w^ork of conquering a wil- 
derness and founding a state required energy the 
most masculine in heart, head and hands. No men 
could fast or work like the Puritans ; none preach, 
none pra}', none fight as they did. The Catholic 
church had neglected public preaching and religious 
instruction ; relying rather on sensuous instruments, 
— architecture, painting, music. In revenge, the 
Puritans had a meeting-house plain as boards could 
make it ; tore the pictures to pieces ; thought an 
organ was "not of God;" and had sermons long 
and numerous, and prayers full of earnestness, zeal, 
piety and faith ; in short, possessed of all desiral)le 
things except — an end. In avoiding old abuses, 
they thought they were not out of the water till they 
were in the fire. And many of their descendants 
teach that work on Sunda}^ amusement, common 
conversation, the reading of a book or paper not 



SUNDAY AND SABBATH. 41 

technically religious, is a sin — just as clearly a sin 
as theft or hatred, though perhaps not so great. 

The good and evil of any age are commonly bound 
so closely together, that in plucking up the tare& 
there is danger lest the wheat also be uprooted, at 
least, trodden down. It must not be ignored that 
the Puritan requirement for all to attend church on 
Sunday, as an act of religion, was a bar extending 
across the stream of worldliness, filling one- seventh 
part of its channel wide and deep, and wonderfull}^ 
interrupting its whelming tide. Did the covetous^ 
the cruel, the strong oppress the weak for six days, 
the Sabbath said, "Hitherto shalt thou come but no 
further ! '■ The slave was then free from his master, 
and the weary was at rest. Good things and great 
things got read out ef the Bible— ^ the rights of the 
weak and the duties of the strong ; good things got 
said in sermon and in prayer ; and the hearers must 
think as well as tremble. Begin to think in a circle 
as narrow as a lady's ring, or the Assembly's Cate- 
chism, and you will think out. Sunday was New 
England's education-day. The prime cause of the 
superiority of her descendants in intelligence and 
morality must be sought in the character of the 
fathers ; but a secondar}^ and powerful cause is to be 
found also in those two institutions, Sunday and 
Preaching. It is not in human nature for men of 
intense religious activity to meet in the same church, 
sing the same psalm, pray the same pra3'er, partake 
of the same elements of communion, and not be 



42 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

touched Avitli compassion — each for all, and all for 
each. The same causes which built up religion in 
New England built up democracy along with it. 
And many a boor boy obliged to toil all the week 
has on Sunda}' stealthily studied secular studies, and 
risen at length to eminence among cultivated men. 

But the notion that the mere act of attending 
church is an act of religion, has often encouraged 
sloth in the clergyman, and blinded him to his own 
defects, and had a bad effect upon his hearers. 
When sermons and prayers are long and numerous, 
one cancels another, and at the end of the day the 
overwearied attention refuses to serve memor3\ 
Man}" Tvho have no opportunit}^ for social intercourse 
except the hours of Sunda}" lose much of the charm 
of life ; become ungenial, stiff, hard and cold. 
Then, too, there is a tendenc}^ to make religion con- 
sist in obedience to form, in compliance with cus- 
tom ; whereas it is really onlj^ in piety and goodness, 
in love to God and love to man. It would not be 
religious to spend the Sunday in listening to the 
mumblings of an idiot or the gibberings of a mad- 
man, even in attending church ; it would be sinful 
idleness. One sermon digested is better than two 
undigested. Religion, dressed in her Sabbath dress, 
should be a welcome guest, lovely and to be desired. 
The effort, though made by honest men to transform 
the Christian Sunday into the Jewish Sabbath, if ever 
successful, cannot but lead to a terrible reaction. 
But if we abandon the superstitious notions respect- 



SUNDAY AND SABBATH. 43 

ing its origin and orginal design, the evils that have 
hitherto liindered its use will soon perish of them- 
selves . There is no danger that in our day men 
will abandon an institution which already has done 
so much service to mankind. Let Sunday and 
Preaching stand on their own merits, and they will 
encounter no more opposition than the Common 
School and the work-days of the week. Then men 
will be ready to appropriate the Sunday to the high- 
est objects they know and can appreciate. Tell men 
the Sunday is made for man, and they will use it for 
its highest use. Tell them man is made for it, and 
they will war on it as a tyrant. 

Although we do not need amusement so much as 
society, instruction, refinement and devotion, yet it 
seems unwise to restrain the innocent sports of chil- 
dren of a Sunday to the same degree that our fathers 
did. All this may be without impudent license on 
the one hand, or slavish superstition on th^ other. 
Let us use the Sunday for the body's rest, for the 
mind's culture, for Religion in its wide sense of pie- 
ty and goodness, for head, for hearty for soul. 



VIII. 

ASCETICISM AND AMUSEMENT. 

Closely allied with the last topic is a very practi- 
cal question : What are, and what are not "sinful 
recreations ? " * Among evangelical christians there 
has grown a tendenc}^ to strengthen the defences of 
character, rather than to foster its growth ; to keep 
it from temptation, rather than to teach it to over- 
come temptation ; to teach it its danger from the 
world, rather than its dut}^ to the world. Conse- 
quently, more has been said about keeping unspot- 
ted from the world than of going into all the world 
and preaching the gospel to every creature ; more 
about coming out and being separate, than knowing 
the truth which shall make free ; more of separating 
wheat from tares, than of leavening lumps. 

Accordingly, although phj'siolog}', common sense, 
experience, philosophy, all teach that amusement is 
a necessity of man's nature as truly as food or drink 
or sleep, they regard it as unsafe, because, more 
readily than some abstract duties, it falls in with hu- 
man inclination. Those ascetics who assert that 
the\' need no amusements and " want to die in har- 
ness," will have an early opportunity to die. Na- 

*In solving it, I am not a little indebted to a discourse once de> 
livered by a Presbyterian T3lergvman, Rev. Marvin R. Vincent 
before the Y. M. C. A. of Troy, N/Y. 



ASCETICISM AND AMUSEMENT. 45 

ture will not suffer even zealous christian men to vi- 
olate her laws with impunity. She forbids man to 
labor continuall}^, and if he persists in disregarding 
her prohibition, she will revenge herself by imbecili- 
t}^, uselessness or death. 

When one asserts that 3^outh must not dance, but 
may march to music in company, and go through 
calisthenic exercises involving a good deal more mo- 
tion than dancing, it is hard to see how skipping to 
music converts the marching to music into sin. It 
is said that the associations make the difference ; but 
the advocate of this theory is shut up to proving 
that the associations are inseparable from the amuse- 
ments. It is well known, however, that the best 
amusements are the ones most likely to be abused ; 
and these, from their intrinsic value, call most loud- 
ly upon virtue to rescue them from their abuses. 

Now the uniform policy of the Gospel is to follow 
the parable of the leaven ; to work for the destruc- 
tion of evil, chiefly through the lodgment and devel- 
opment of good. With what calmness did Christ 
move amid the moral ruin that encompassed him ! 
With how little of that anxious haste and longing 
for immediate results which characterizes so many 
modern reformers ! There was less of a direct on- 
slaught upon evil, than the developing of a seed 
of positive truth here and there. The christian 
world has spent much time in peering into amuse- 
ments to see what evil they contained, and has kept 
digging away at this instead of putting Divine 



46 A VOICE FPwOM THE PEWS. 

grace into them, in simple faith in God, and letting 
that at once purge and regulate them. The church 
has fenced off this and that corner of the field 
of recreation, and put up signs : " All church mem- 
hers are learned against trespassing on these grounds^ 
under ];)enalty of the law^^' instead of trjing to teach 
christians how to avail themselves, with profit and 
safety of any part of this field. B}' the faults of 
some theatrical representations we must, forsooth be 
cut off from Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth. 
Because of the indecencies of certain round dances,* 
we must not, forsooth, participate in a quadrille. 
Nay ! Let ridicule and denunciation exhaust their 
armories against all positive evils ; but let us not 
forget that these abuses are not inseparable from the 
amusement, -which, in proper forms is healthy, grace- 
ful, innocent and highh' commendable. 

An amiable and excellent clergyman of New York 
happened to be present one evening when some 
3'oung ladies went through a quadrille. He looked 
on with great apparent pleasure. The next morning 
he was rallied as having countenanced dancing ; 
when he roundly denied the charge, and asserted 
that no "^'dancing'' had taken place, but only "a 
most beautiful exercise.'' 

*Tlie writer must not be understood to condemn the legitimate 
waltz, polka, S:q. " How about ' Copenhagen ? ' asks a fun-loving 
(proof) reader." . "Is that a 'round' dance, Miss?" ''Rather 
round, sir," " Is it elevating? " " Really, sir, when I was play— 
dancing it with my grandpapa, one Tlianksgi\i.ng night, I was 
elevated until my face was up to his own." '"He stooped some- 
what?" ''I dare say. Give me a bow that does not 'lose its 
elasticity.' " 



ASCETICISM AND AMUSEMENT, 47 

It may be true that in a season of deep religious 
interest in a church, there will be less disposition to 
amusements. But the same is true of other than re- 
ligious interests ; under any absorbing, popular ex- 
citement, men do not turn to amusement. A spec- 
ial religious interest will draw men's minds from 
business as well as from pleasure ; and the inference 
to the condemnation of business is just as legitimate 
as to that of amusement. The aggregate of christ- 
ian society has been for manj^ years past developing 
a stead il}' increasing interest in the subject, and a 
corresponding liberality of sentiment respecting it. 
Colleges, from which in years past, students would 
have been summarily expelled for rolling ten pins, 
have now bowling allej's of their own. Persons of 
liberal culture and unquestionable piety, more and 
more are throwing open their houses to certain 
banned amusements very much to the enhancement 
of home attractions, and to the detriment of the sa- 
loons. Church legislation on this subject has kept 
noble and intelligent youth out of the church by in- 
sisting on their relinquishment of certain amuse- 
ments, in the proper and moderate use of which 
they w^ere unable to see evil. 

The church is too shy of a faith in the power of 
good which comes eating and drinking ; which sits 
at the table of publicans and sinners. Too many 
christians regard truth as a tender stripling, to be 
rolled up in mufflers, and suffered to walk out only 
in charge of certain staid nurses of theory ; and not 



48 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

iis a man of war in panopl}', and with strength 
<3nough to take care not only of itself, bnt of them 
and their trusted theories too. They are afraid the 
-evil will overwhelm or corrupt the truth ; that the 
leaven, instead of imparting virtue will be spoiled 
by the deadness of the lump. But the objection 
that an imagined inconsistency ma}^ offend weak 
brethren is pushed too far when made to extend to 
all the vagaries of individual prejudice, or the aban- 
donment of principle, — the principle underlying the 
question whether christians will resolutelj^ take up 
good and noble amusements, and give them to youth 
purged of their evil, or whether they shall let them 
remain girt with all their allurements, yet more 
widely separated from good, and gathering year!}' to 
themselves new elements and associations of evil. 
The parents in whose famil3^-circle dancing in prop- 
er modes and with approved associates and within 
reasonable hours is encouraged, are doing just so 
much to keep their daughters from the unhealthy 
hours, the immodest displa3's, and the indiscriminate 
dissociations of some ball-rooms. 

Nor ought the general principle of purging amuse- 
ments by a closer contact of religion with them to 
he abandoned, merely because in certain cases this 
regulation becomes a matter of extreme difhculty 
and delicacy. One ought not to refuse to denounce 
intemperance or crime merely because he cannot pre- 
scribe an effectual scheme for abolishing it. Wheth- 
er it is desirable to see Shakespeare interpreted b3' 



ASCETICISM AND AMUSEMENT. 49 

the best histrionic talent, with proper adjuncts of 
scenery and costume, but with nothing coarse or 
indecent, is one simple question ; how the theater 
may be reformed is quite a different and complex 
one. 

Something too may be said in favor of the disci- 
pline, the strength of certain qualities which can 
only be achieved hy practice of moral theory, — by 
meeting and overcoming temptation in real life. 

" For firmness hath its appetite, and craves 
The stronger lure, more strongly to resist; 
Would know the touch of gold to fling it off ; 
Scent wine to feel its lip the soberer; 
Behold soft byssus, ivory and plumes 
To say 'They're fair, but I will none of them,' 
And flout Enticement in the very face." * 

* Right here may pertinently be quoted the "Indenture" which 
the Abbe gave Wilhelm Meister, to be adverted to on a follow- 
ing page : 

"Art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, opportunity 
transient. To act is easy, to think is hard ; to act according to 
our thoughts is troublesome. Every beginniug is cheerful; the 
threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands aston- 
ished, his impressions guide him ; he learns sportfully, serious- 
ness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us ; what 
should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rare- 
ly found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps 
to it do not : with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along 
the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught; the artist 
needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always 
wrong; who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom 
or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruc- 
tion they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying 
for a single day ; but flour cannot be sown and seed-corn cannot 
be ground. AVords are good but they are not the best. The best 
is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is 
the highest matter. Action can be understood and again repre- 
sented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing 
while he acts aright, but of what is wrong wc are always con- 
scious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypo- 
crite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be 
together. Their babbling detains the scholar; their obstinate 
mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true 
artist gives us opens the mind; for words fail him, deeds speak. 
The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, 
and ap]>roaches more and more to being a master.— T. Carlyle's 
Translation; vol. ii. p. 70. Boston: Ticknor *& Fields (James R. 
Osgood <& Co. successors.) 



50 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Another objection to amusements takes the form 
of a question with disguised 7i07i constat. "Think 
of Paul dancing ! or Peter playing billiards ! Would 
j^ou play chess on your death-bed ? Do you think 
we shall have checker-boards in heaven?" The at- 
tempted sequitur is this: ''Certain things appear 
incongruous with our ideas of the character and work 
of certain men ; therefore these works are sinful.'* 
Is tent-making sinful because our fancy-picture of 
Paul sewing on canvass clashes with our idea of him 
preaching on Mars Hill? Think of Timothy skat- 
ing ! therefore, boys, don't skate ! Think of John 
running with a fire-engine ! therefore, merely use 
waterpails ? On 3^our death-bed you would not wear 
j^our hat and boots ; therefore, — what? In heaven 
you will not marry nor be given in marriage ; there- 
fore — what? 

Nay, let more joy be brought out of the world 
by christians ! Let the Gospel be boldly carried 
into some things from which it has been kept aloof ! 
Let the christian life be more in the spirit than in 
the letter ! Let the christian conscience be clothed 
with principles, and not with dogmas ! Let us have 
less of the religion that is 

"Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern," 

and more of that which is full of childlike trust in 
the love of God and the power of truths and of free- 
dom purged by love from license. 



CULTURE, THOUGHT AND WORSHIP. 

In saying ''freedom, purged by love from li- 
cense," I would imply that culture which, in indi- 
vidual no less than in national character, is the safe- 
guard against anarchy. " The best man," said Soc- 
rates, '' is he who most tries to perfect himself, and 
the happiest man is he who most feels that he is per- 
fecting himself." If 3^ou answer this with Carlyle's 
pleasantry: "Socrates is terribly at ease in Zion," 
you will have to be reminded of another witty Eng- 
lishman's remark: ''No man who knows nothing 
else knows even his Bible.'^ In our country, the 
multitude are jealous of "undemocratic" ideas • 

" Life is a various mother . . . , But to these 
She came a frugal matron neat and deft. 
With cheerful morning thoughts and quick device 
To find the much in little." 

But the vulgar ideal of frugality is not without 
admixture of illiberality.* As Matthew Arnold has 
well said,! what we want is a fuller harmonious de- 
velopment of our humanit}', a free play of thought 

* ** The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often 
virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-head- 
ed gentleman or lady, whom in passing we regret to take as le- 
gal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy 
theory of life in the minds of those who live with them— like a 
piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes 
color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty stand- 
ards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making 
somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pan- 
theon of ugly idols."— Geokge Elliot. 

t '* Culture and Anarchy : " London : Smith, Elder & Co. 



52 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

upon our routine notions, spontaneity of conscious- 
ness, sweetness and light ; and these are just what 
culture generates and fosters. Proceeding from this 
idea of the harmonious perfection of humanity, and 
seeking to help itself up towards this perfection by 
knowing and spreading the best which has been 
reached in the world — an object not to be gained 
without books and reading — culture has got its name 
touched, in the. fancies of men, with a sort of air of 
bookishness and pedantry, cast upon it by the fol- 
lies of the many bookmen who forget the end in the 
means, and use their books with no real aim at per- 
fection. 

But what we are concerned for is the thing, not the 
name ; and the thing, call it by w^hat name we will, 
is simply the enabling ourselves, whether by read- 
ing, observing or thinking, to come as near as w^e 
can to the firm intellgible law of things, and thus to 
get a basis for a less confused action and a more 
complete perfection than we have at present. The 
character of the communit}^ is the total of that of its 
members. The State is of the religion of all its 
citizens, without the fanaticism of any of them.* 

* " From tlie first animal tendency to handicraft attempts, up to 
the highest practicing of inteUectual art; from the inarticulate 
croAvings of" the happy infant up to the polished utterance of 
the orator and singer; from the first bickerings of boys, up to 
the vast equipments by which countries are conquered and re- 
tained; from the slightest kindliness, and the most transitory 
love, up to tlie fiercest passion, and the most earnest covenant; 
from the merest perception of sensible presence, up to the faint- 
est ijresentiments and hopes of the remotest spiritual future; 
all this, and much more, also, lies in man and must be culti- 
vated: yet not in one but in many. Every gift is valuable and 
ought to be unfolded, When one encourages the beautiful 
alone, and another encourages the useful alone, it taives them 



CULTURE, THOUGHT AND WORSHIP. 53 

In religion there are two parts, the part of spec- 
ulation, and the part of worship and devotion. 
Christ, in his declaration that his kingdom is not of 
this world, certainly meant his religion as a force 
of inward persuasion acting on the soul to employ 
both parts as perfectly as possible. The one is an 

individual matter ; the other collective "The 

same devotion," says Joubert, "unites men far 
more than the same thought and knowledge." Man 
worships best with the community ; he philosophizes 
best alone. So it seems that whosoever would truly 
give effect to Christ's declaration that his religion 
is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, 
would leave our thought on the intellectual aspects 
of Christianity as individual as possible, but would 
make christian worship as collective as possible. 

Perfection, — as culture, from a thorough disinter- 
ested study of human nature and human experience, 
learns to conceive it, — is an harmonious expansion 
of all the powers w^hich make the beauty and worth 
of human nature, and is not consistent with the 
over-development of any one power at the expense 
of the rest. But the idea of perfection as such har- 
monious expansion of human nature, is at variance 



both to form a man. The useful encourages itself; for the mul- 
titude produce it, and no one can dispense with it : the beautiful 
must be encouraged; for few can set it forth, and many need it. 
One power rules another; none can cultivate another: in each 
endowment, and not elsewhere, lies the force which must com- 
plete it. . . . There are a few who at once have Thouglit and 
the capacity for Action. Thought expands, but lames; Action 
animates but narrows. ... A man is never happy till his vague 
striving has itself marked out its proper limitation."— Goethe, 
in •< Wilhelra Meister's Apprenticeship." 



54 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for 
seeing more than one side of a thing, with our in- 
tense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit 
we happen to be following. So culture has a rough 
task to achieve, and its preachers are likely long to 
have a hard time of it. 

Men of culture, wherein they have failed in mor- 
ality, have been punished : but their ideal of beauty 
and sweetness and light, and a human nature com- 
plete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of per- 
fection still ; just as the Puritan's ideal of perfec- 
tion remains narrow and inadequate, although for 
what he did well he has been richly rewarded. Not- 
withstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fa- 
ther's voyage, they and their standard of perfection 
are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves 
Shakespeare or Virgil, — souls in whom sweetness 
and light, and all that in human nature is most hu- 
man, were eminent, — accompanying them on their 
voyage, and think what intolerable company Shake- 
peare and Yirgil would have found them. 

In endeavoring to establish the State, or organ of 
our collective best self, of our national right reason, 
we are inspired by faith that we are on our wa}^ to 
what the Duke of Wellington admirably described 
as " a revolution by due course of law.'' The fun- 
damental idea of this discipline must be self-con- 
quest, self-devotion, the following not our own indi- 
vidual will, but the will of God, obedience. Only, 
as the old law and network of prescriptions with 



CULTURE, THOUGHT AND WORSHIP. 55 

which it enveloped human life were evidently a mo- 
tive power not driving and searching enough to pro- 
duce the result aimed at, — a patient continuence in 
well-doing, self-conquest,- — Christianity substituted 
boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting 
pattern of self-conquest offered by Christ ; and by 
the new motive power, of which the essence was 
this, — though the love and admiration of Christian 
churches have for centuries been employed in vary- 
ing, amplifying, and adorning the plain description 
of it, — Christianity, as St. Paul truly says, "estab- 
lishes the law," and in the strength of the ampler 
power which she has thus supplied to fulfil it, has 
accomplished the miracles of her history. 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION.* 

But what does Paul mean in saying Christianity 
'' establishes the lav/ ?" Howsoever you may, further 
on, differ with me as to his views of resurrection, 
I think we shall here harmonize, provided you will 
make certain allowances for Paul's Orientalism of 
speech. For instance, when he sa3's''God hath 
concluded them all in unbelief that he might have 
merc}' upon all," 3'ou will not assume that he means 
to assert formall}' that God acted with this set de- 
sign ; but being full of the happ}- and divine end to 
the unbelief spoken of, he, by a vivid and striking 
figure, represents the unbelief as actually caused 
with a view to this end. 

We, moreover, — we prosaic Occidental readers — 
are not apt enough to comprehend Paul's mode of 
expression when he Judaizes. A Jew himself, he 
uses the Jewish scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and 
uncritical fashion, as if they had a talismanic 
character ; as if for a doctrine, however true in it- 
self, their confirmation was still necessar}", and as if 

*In the analysis of Paul's character and experience, the writer 
acknowledges "his great indebtedness to a sermon preached more 
than a quarter of a century ago, by a beloved clergyman of the 
Maine Methodist Conference, Rev. Benjamin Burriham, lately 
deceased at Groton, Vermont; also, to the recent masterly trea- 
tise by Matthew Arnold, entitled, <* St. Paul and Protestantism;" 
London : Smith, Elder & Co. 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION. 57 

this confirmation was to be got from their mere 
words alone, however detached from the sense of 
their context, and however violent!}^ allegorized or 
otherwise wrested. To use the Bible in this way, 
even for purposes of illustration, is often an inter- 
ruption to the argument, a fault of st3^1e ; to use it 
in this way for real proof and confirmation, is a 
fault of reasoning.- An example of the first fault 
may be seen in the tenth chapter of the epistle to 
the Komans, and in the beginning of the third chap- 
ter ; in either place, his point that faith comes by 
hearing, and his point that God's oracles were true 
though the Jews did not believe them, would stand 
without their scaffolding of Bible quotation. An 
instance of the second fault is in the third and 
fourth chapters of the epistle to the Galatians, 
where the Biblical argumentation by which he seeks 
to prove his case is as unsound as his case itself is 
sound. 

Accordingly, as Paul, having always religious 
edification in direct view, never set out his doctrine 
with a design of exhibiting it as a scientific whole, 
we must find out for ourselves the order in which his 
ideas naturally stand, and the connection between 
one of them and the other, in order to arrive at the 
real scheme of his teaching, aa compared with the 
schemes exhibited by certain creed-compilers. 

What sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the 
desire to flee from the wrath to come ; what sets the 
Methodist in motion, seems to be the desire for eter- 



58 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

nal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion? 
It is the impulse, — the master-impulsa of Hebraism, 
— the desire for righteousness. ' ' I exercise myself," 
he told Felix, "to have a conscience void of offence 
towards God and men continually." The end and 
aim of all religion, access to God, the sense of har- 
mony with the universal order, the partaking of the 
divine nature, — that our faith and hope might be in 
God, — that we might have life and have it abund- 
antly, — meant for the Hebrew, access to the source 
of the moral order in especial, and harmony with it. 
It was the greatness of the Hebrew race that it felt 
the authority of this order, its preciousness, its 
beneficence, so strongly. ''How precious are thy 
thoughts unto me, O God I" "The law of thy 
mouth is better than thousands of gold and silver." 
"M}' soul is consumed with the fervent desire that it 
hath alway unto th}' judgments." It was the great- 
ness of their best individuals that in them this feel- 
ing was incessantly urgent to prove in the only sure 
manner, — in action, "Blessed are they who hear 
the word of God and keep it." "K thou wouldst 
enter into life, keep the commandments." '* Let no 
man deceive you, he that doetli righteousness is 
righteous." What distinguishes Paul is both his 
conviction that the commandment is holy, and just, 
and good ; and also his desire to give effect to the 
commandment, to establish it. It was this which 
gave to his endeavor after a clear conscience such 
meaning and efficacity. It was this which gave him 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION, 59 

insight to see that there could be no radical differ- 
ence, in respect of salvation, and the way to it, 
between Jew and Gentile. "Upon every soul of 
man that worketh evil^ whosoever he may be, tribu- 
lation and anguish ; to every one that worketh goody 
glory, honor, and peace. 

St. Paul's practical religious sense, joined to his 
strong intellectual power, enabled him to discern 
and follow the range of the commandment, both as 
to man's actions and as to his heart and thoughts, 
with extroardinar}^ force and closeness. His reli- 
gion had a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing- 
is so natural to the mj'stic as, in rich single words, 
such as faith, light, love, to snm up and take 
for granted, without specially enumerating them, 
all good moral principles and habits. Yet nothing 
is more remarkable in Paul than the frequent, nay, 
incessant lists, in the most particular detail, of 
moral habits to be pursued or avoided. The more 
one studies these lists, the more does their signifi- 
cance come out: for instance, that of "things 
which are not convenient,"* or that of the fruits 
of the spirit. t The man who wrote with all this 
searching minuteness knew accurately what he meant 
by sin and righteousness, and did not use these 
words at random. His dilligent comprehensiveness 
in his plan of duties is only less admirable than his 
diligent sincerity. The sterner virtues and the 
gentler — his conscience will not let him rest till he 

* Envy, murder, captiousness, &c. Rom. i. 29-32. 
t Love, joy, seJf-coiitrol, &c. Gal. v. 22-23. 



60 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

has embraced them all. In his deep resolve "to 
make out by actual trial what is that good and per- 
fect and acceptable will of God/' he goes back upon 
himself again and again, he makes a duty at every 
point of our nature, and at points the most oppo- 
site, for fear he should by possibility be leaving 
behind him some weakness still indulged, some 
subtle promptings to evil not yet brought into cap- 
tivity. 

Most men have the defects, as the saying is, of 
their qualities ; because the}^ are ardent and severe 
they have no sense for gentleness and sweetness ; 
because thc}^ are sweet and gentle, they have no 
sense for severity' and ardor. But with Paul, the 
very same fullness of moral nature which made him 
an ardent Pharisee, "as concerning zeal, persecut- 
ing the church, touching the righteousness which is 
in the law, blameless," was so large that it carried 
him out of Pharisaism and beyond it, when once he 
found how much needed doing in him which Phar- 
isaism could not do. Two things are strikingly con- 
spicuous : one, the earnest insistance with which he 
recommends "bowels of mercies," as he calls them, 
meekness, humbleness of mind, gentleness, unwea- 
rying forbearance, crowned all of them with that 
emotion of charity "which is the bond of perfect- 
ness ;" the other, the force with which he dwells on 
the solidarity (to use a modern phrase) of man, — the 
joint interest, that is, which binds humanity togeth- 
er, the dut}^ of respecting every one's part in life, 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION. 61 

and of doing justice to his efforts to fulfill that part. 
Never surely did such a controversialist, such a mas- 
ter of sarcasm and invective, commend, with such 
manifest sincerity and such persuasive emotion, the 
qualities of meekness and gentleness ! Never sure- 
ly did a worker, who took with such energy his own 
line, and who was so born to preponderate and pre- 
dominate in whatever line he took, insist so often 
and so admirably that the lines of other workers 
were just as good as his own ! At no time, per- 
haps, did Paul arrive at practicing quite perfectly 
what he thus preached ; but this only sets in a stron- 
ger light the thorough love of righteousness, which 
made him seek out, and put so prominently forward, 
and so strive to make himself and others fulfil, parts 
of righteousness which do not force themselves on 
the common conscience like the duties of soberness, 
temperance and activity, and which were somewhat 
alien, certainly, to his own particular nature. 
Therefore we cannot but believe that into this spirit, 
so possessed with the hunger and thirst for right- 
eousness, and precisely because it was so possessed 
by it, the characteristic doctrines of Christ, which 
brought a new aliment to feed this hunger and 
thirst, — of Christ whom, except in vision he had 
never seen, but who was in every one's words and 
thoughts, the teacher who was meek and lowly in 
heart, w^ho said men were brothers and must love 
one another, that the last should often be first, that 
the exercise of dominion and lordship had nothing 



62 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

in them desirable, and that we must become as little 
children, — sank down and worked there even before 
Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in 
getting him ready for the crisis of his conversion. 

Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness 
to the eyes of this indefatigable explorer of it, and 
enlarged the domain of duty of which Pharisaism 
showed him only a portion. Then, after the satis- 
faction thus given to his desire for a full conception 
of righteousness, came Christ's injunctions to make 
clean the inside as well as the outside, to beware of 
the least leaven of hypocrisy and self-flattery, of 
saving and not doing ; and finally the injunction to 
feel, after doing all we can, that, as compared with 
the standard of perfection, we are still unprofitable 
servants. These teachings were, to a man like 
Paul, for the practice of righteousness, what the 
others were for the theory ; sj'mpathetic utterances, 
which made the inmost chords of his being vibrate, 
and w^hich irresitably drew him sooner or later 
towards their utterer. Need it be said that he nev- 
er forgot them, and that in all his pages the}- have 
left their trace? It is even affecting to see, how, 
when he is driven for the xery sake of righteous- 
ness to put the law of righteousness in the second 
place, and to seek outside the lavr itself for a 
power to fulfill the law, how, I sa}^ he returns 
again and again to the elucidation of his one 
sole design in all his doing ; how he labors to 
prevent all possibility of misunderstanding, and to 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION. 63 

show that he is only leaving the moral law for a mo- 
ment in order to establish it forever more victori- 
ously. What earnestness and pathos in the assur- 
ance : "If there had been a law given which could 
have given life, verily, righteousness should have 
been by the law!'' "Do I condemn the law?" he 
keeps saying; " do I forget that the commandment 
is hol}^ just and good ! Because we are no longer 
under the law, are we to sin? Am I seeking to 
make the course of my life and yours other than a 
service and an obedience ? '' To such a character, 
circumcision is nothing, dogmatics are nothing, but 
the keeping of the commandments of God. 

But to serve God, to follow that central clue in 
our moral being which unites us to the universal or- 
der, is no easy task. In some way or other, every 
man is conscious of an opposition in him between 
the flesh and the spirit. * The lusts of the flesh, the 
law in our members, inordinate aflection, take natu- 
rally no account of anything but themselves ; this 
arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can pro- 
duce only confusion and misery. The spirit, the 
law of our mind, takes account of the universal mor- 
al order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of 
that order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a 
man sowing to his flesh, because each of us has of 

* " AVe please our fancy witli ideal webs 
Of innovation, but our life meanwhile 
Is in tlie loom, where busy passion plies 
The shuttle to and fro, and gives our deeds 
The accustomed pattern." 
Or as the Latin poet has been translated : 

*' We see the right and we approve it too ; 
We see the wrong and yet thQ wrong i)iu'sue." 



64 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

Lis own this individual body, this congeries of flesh 
and bones, blood and nerves, different from that of 
every one else, and with desires and impulses driv- 
ing each of ns his own separate way ; and he sa^'s 
that a man who sows to this, sows to a thousand ty- 
rants, and can reap no worthy harvest. But he 
talks of sowing to the spirit ; because there is one 
central moral tendency which for us and for all men 
is the law of our being, and through reason and 
righteousness we move in this universal order and 
with it. In this conformitj' to the idll of God, as 
we religiously name the moral order, is our peace 
and happiness. 

But how to find the energy and power to bring all 
those self-seeking tendencies of the flesh, those mul- 
titudinous, swarming, eager, and incessant impul- 
ses, into obedience to the central tendency-? Mere 
commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only 
irritates opposition in the desires it tries to control. 
It even enlarges their power, because it makes ns 
feel our impotence ; and the confusion caused by 
their nngoverned working is increased b}' our being 
filled by a deepened sense of disharmony, remorse 
and dismay. " I was alive without the law once," 
sa^'s Paul ; the natural play of all the forces and de- 
sires in me went on smoothlj^ enough so long as I 
did not attempt to introduce order and regulation 
among them. But the condition of immoral tran- 
quilit}' could not in man be permanent. That nat- 
ural law of reason and conscience which all men 



PHARISAISM AND CONVICTION. 65 

have, was sufficient by itself to produce a conscious- 
ness of rebellion and disquietude. Matters became 
onl}^ worse by the exhibition of the Mosaic law, the 
offspring of a moral sense more poignant and 
stricter, however little it might show of subtle in- 
sight and delicac}^, than the moral sense of the mass 
of mankind. The A^ery stringency of the Mosaic- 
code increased the feeling .of dismay and helpless- 
iiess ; it set forth the law of righteousness more au- 
thoritatively and minutel}^, yet did not supply anj^ 
sufficient power to keep it. Neither the law of na- 
ture, therefore, nor the law of Moses, availed to bind 
men to righteousness. So we come to the word 
which is the governing word of the Epistle to the 
Romans, — the word all. The Gentile with the law 
of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail 
to achieve righteousness. ''^ All have sinned and 
come short of the glory of God." All do what they 
would not, and do not what they would ; all feel 
themselves enslaved, impotent, guiJt}^ miserable. 
"O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me 
from the bodj^ of this death ! " 



XI. 

'• CONVERSION TO CHRIST." 

Recognition of certain phenomena requires no 
great metaph3'sical acumen. We do not care to 
question Constantine's averment to Eusebins that 
he saw in the sky a cross inscribed ' ' In hoc signo 
vinces.^' Swedenborg's consciousness of the Stock- 
holm conflagration, hundreds of miles away, is too 
well attested to be doubted. As to Joan de Arc's 
''call," and some other alleged cases of "second 
sight," mj^steries is a better name for them than 
absurdities.* Ought one who has always been so 
healthy and sound as never to have had any dreams, 
to deny the experience in others, however excusable 
he may be for not comprehending it? The move- 
ments of the somnambulist, the flight of a bat be- 
tween the interstrung wires of a dark room, — shall 
we, when unable to affirm the possibility of a sixth 
sense, deny preternatural mental action altogether? 

* " Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is mat- 
ter of knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, con- 
ceptions,— nay, traveled conchisions— continually take the form 
of images wliich have a foreshadowing power: the deed they 
would do starts up before them in complete shape, making a co- 
ercive type ; theevent they hunger for or dread rises into vision 
with a reed-like growth, feeding itself fast on unnumbered im- 
pressions. They are not always the less capable of the argu- 
mentative process, nor less sane than the common-place calcu- 
lators of the market. Sometimes it may be that their natures 
have manifold openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, where 
there may naturally be a greater and more miscellanious inrush 
than through a narrow beadle-watched iDortal.— G-eo. Elliot. 



''conversion to CHRIST." 67 

The old saying that " sin deserves delirium," is not 
bad philosophy, especially if we accept the phrenol- 
ogist's definition, namel3^ " sin is the abuse of any 
faculty or propensity." 

Now the conversion of St. Paul is in itself an in- 
cident of precisely the same order as the conversion 
of Sampson Staniforth, a Methodist soldier in the 
campaign of Fonteno}'. Staniforth himself relates 
his conversion as follows, in words which bear 
plainly marked on them the very stamp of good 
faith : 

" From twelve at night until two, it was my turn 
to stand sentinel at a dangerous post. I had a fel- 
low sentinel, but I desired him to go away, which he 
willingl}^ did. As soon as I was alone, I knelt down 
and determined not to rise but to continue crying 
and wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. 
How long I was in that agony I cannot tell ; but as 
I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceed- 
ing bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. 
At the same moment these words w^ere applied to my 
heart ' Thy sins are forgiven thee.' All guilt was 
gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace ; 
the fear of death and hell was vanished awa3\ I 
was filled with wonder and astonishment. I closed 
my e3'es, but the impression was still the same ; and 
for about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me be 
where I would, the same appearance was still before 
my eyes, and the same impression upon my heart, 
Thy sins are forgiven thee,'' 



68 A VOICE FROM J'lIE PEWS. 

Not the narrative in the Acts, of Paul's journey to 
Damascus, could more convince us of its own hon- 
est}'. But this honest}' makes nothing, as every one 
will admit, for the scientific truth of any scheme of 
doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which 
must prove itself and its own scientific value before 
science can admit it. Precisel}' the same is it with 
Paul's doctrine ; it relies on facts of experience, and 
he asserts nothing w^hich science cannot verify.* 

We left Paul in collision with a fact of human 
nature, but in itself a sterile fact, on which it is pos- 
sible to dwell too long, — the sense of sin ; for sin is 
not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to 
be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is 
indispensable for the firm efibrt to get rid of it, is 
waste of energy and waste of time. We then enter 
that element of morbid and subjective brooding, in 
which so man}" have perished. No Hebrew prophet 
or psalmist felt what sin was more powerfully than 
Paul. ''Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me so 
that I am not able to look up ; they are more than 
the hairs of my head, therefore my heart faileth me." 
They are more than the hairs of my head. The mo- 
tions of what Paul calls "the law in our members" 
are indeed a hydra-brood ; when we are working 
against one fault, a dozen others crop out without 
our expecting it ; and this it is which drives the man 
who deals seriously with himself to difficulty, nay, to 



*See "St. Paul and Protestantism," already cited ; also Paley'a 
Horoe Faulince. 



''conversion to CHRIST." 69 

despair. Paul did not need James to tell him that 
whoever offends in one point is guilty of all;, he 
knew it himself, and the unrest this knowledge gave 
him was his very starting-point. He knew, too, that 
nothing outward, no satisfaction of all the require- 
ments men may make upon us, no privileges of any 
sort, can give peace of conscience ; — of conscience, 
" w^hose praise is not of men but of God." He 
knew, also, that the law of the moral order stretches 
beyond us and our private conscience, is independ- 
ent of our sense of having kept it, and stands abso- 
lute and what in itself it is ; even, therefore, though 
I may know nothing against myself, yet this is not 
enough, I may still not be just. Finally, Paul knew 
that merely to know all this and say it, is of no use, 
advances us nothing; ''the kingdom of God is not 
in word but in power.'' 

We have remarked that the Hebrew's first and 
deepest conception of God, was, as the source of 
the moral order. But God is also to the Hebrew, 
"our rock, which is higher than we," the power by 
which we have been " upholden ever since we were 
born," that has "fashioned us and laid his hand up- 
on us" and envelops us on every side, that has 
"made us fearfully and w^onderfully," and whose 
"mercy is over all his works." In his speech at 
Athens, and in the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
Romans, Paul shows how full he too was of this feel- 
ing. This clement in which we live and move and 
have our being, which stretches around and beyond 



70 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

the strict!}'' moral element in us, around and beyond 
the finite sphere of Avhat is originated, measured, 
and controlled b}" our own understanding and will, 
— this infinite element is very present to Paul's 
thoughts, and makes a profound impression on 
them. By this element we are receptive and influ- 
enced, not originative and influencing ; now, w^e all 
of us recieve far more than we originate. Our 
pleasure from a spring day we do not make ; our 
pleasure even from an approving conscience we do 
not make. And yet we feel that both the one pleas- 
ure and the other can, and often do, work with us in 
a wonderful way for our good. So we get the 
thought of an impulsion outside ourselves which is at 
once awful and beneficent. " No man," as the He- 
brew psalm says, ''hath quickened his own soul." 
'' I know," says Jeremiah, " that the way of man is 
not in himself ; it is not in man that walketh to di- 
rect his steps." Most true and natural is this feel- 
ing ; and the greater men are, the more natural is 
this feeling to them. 

The voluntar}^, rational, and human world, of moral 
choice, effort, filled the first place in Paul's spirit. 
The necessar}' , mystical, and divine world, of in- 
fluence, sympath}^, emotion, filled the second ; and 
he could pass naturally from the one world to the 
other. The presence in Paul of this twofold feeling 
acted irresistibh^ upon his doctrine. What he calls 
'' the power that worketh in us," and that produces 
results transcending all our expectations and calcu- 



''conversion to CHRIST." 71 

lations, he instinctively sought to combine with our 
personal agencies of reason and conscience. Of 
such a mysterious power and its operation some clear 
notion may be got by anybody who has even had 
any overpowering attachment, or has been in love. 
A timid man then shows courage, an indolent man 
diligence. ''I seek," says Paul, "to apprehend 
that for which I am apprehended by Christ." And 
this for which he is thus apprehended is the righU 
eousness of God; not an incomplete and maimed 
righteousness, not a partial and unsatisf^'ing estab- 
lishment of the law of the of the spirit, dominant 
today, deposed tomorrow, effective at one or tw^o 
points, failing in a hundred ; no, but an entire con- 
formity at all points with the divine moral order, the 
will of God, and, in consequence, a sense of har- 
mony with this order, of acceptance with God. For 
attaining this, Paul saw no such impotence existing 
in Christ's case as in his own. For Christ, the un- 
certain conflict between the law in our members and 
the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those 
eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which 
drove Paul to despair, in Christ were absent ; 
smoothly and inevitably he followed the real and 
eternal order in preference to the momentary and 
apparent order. Obstacles outside him there were 
plenty, but obstacles within him there were none. 
He was led by the spirit of God ; he was dead to 
ein, he lived to God ; and in this life to God he per- 
severed even to the cruel bodily death of the cross. 



72 A. VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, 
are the sons of God. If this is so with even us, 
who live to God so feebly and who render such im- 
perfect obedience, how much more is he who lives to 
God entirely and who renders an unalterable obedi- 
ence, the unique and only Son of God? 

The Jewish theological doctrine respecting the 
eternal word or wisdom of God, which was with 
God from the beginning before the oldest of his 
works, and through which the world was created, 
this doctrine which appears in the Book of Prov- 
erbs* and again in the Book of Wisdom, | Paul ap- 
plied to Christ. J But this was secondary, and not 
an original part of his system, much less the ground 
of it. This was John's starting-point ; but Paul's 
concern with Christ is as the clew to righteousness, 
not as the clew to transcendental ontolog}' . 

Much more visible and important than his identi- 
fication of Christ with the divine hj^oostasis known 
as the Logos, is Paul's identification of him with 
the Messiah. Ever present is his recognition of 
him as the Messiah to whom all the law and prophets 
pointed, of whom the heart of the Jewish race was 
full, and on whom the Jewish instructors of Paul's 
youth had dwelt abandantl3\ That Christ w^as the 
divine Logos, or that he was the Jewish Messiah, 
science can neither deny nor affirm ; but that he was 
the fulfillment of the righteousness of God was 
apparent in the Gospel-histor}', and is the scientific 

♦Prov.vm.22-P. t Wisd. vii. 25-7. $ Col. i. 15-17. 



"conversion to CHRIST." 73 

result of that llistor3^ Of Christ's life and death, 
the all-importance for us, according to Paul, is that 
hy means of them, ''denying ungodliness and 
worldl}^ lusts, we should live soberl}^, righteously, 
and godly ;" should be enabled to ' ' bear fruit to 
God" in "love, joy, peace, long suffering, kind- 
ness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control." Of 
Christ's life and death the scope was " to redeem us 
from all iniquit}^, and make us purely jealous for 
good works." Paul adds, that we are to live thus 
in the actual world which now is, " with the expec- 
tation of the appearing of the glory of God and 
Christ." By nature and habit, and with his full 
belief that the end of the world was nigh at hand, 
Paul used these words to mean a Messianic coming 
and kingdom. Later Christianity has transformed 
them as it has transformed so much else of Paul's, 
to a life beyond the grave, but it has by no means 
spiritualized them. Paul, as his spiritual growth 
advanced, spiritualized them more and more ; he 
came to think, in using them, more and more of a 
gradual, inward transformation of the world by a 
conformity like Christ's to the will of God, than a 
Messianic advent. Yet, even then they are always 
second with him, and not first ; the essence of 
saving grace is always to make us more righteous, 
to bring us into conformity with the divine law, to 
enable us to " bear fruit to God." 

" Clirist gave himself for us that he might redeem 
us from iniquity." First of all, he rendered an 



74 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

unbroken obedience to the law of the spirit ; he 
served the spirit of God ; he came, not to do his 
own will, but the will of God. Now, the law of the 
spirit makes men one ; it is onl}^ by the law in oar 
members that we are many. Secondly, therefore, 
Christ had an unfailing sense of what we have 
called, using an expressive modern term, the soU- 
clarity of men ; that it was not God's will that one 
of his hinnan creatures, should perish. Thirdly, 
Christ i:H'e&umed on this 'uninterrupted obedience to 
the law of the Spirit, in this unfailing sense of 
human solidarity, even to the death ; though everj^- 
thing befell him which might break the one or tire 
the other. Lastly, he had in himself, in all he said 
and did, that infallible force of attraction which 
doubled the virtue of everything said and done by 
him. 



XIT. 

PAUL ON ''FAITH" AND ''RESURRECTION." 

But right here, perhaps you would caution me not 
to ignore the covenant alleged by Milton and others 
to have been passed at a Trinity-council, a prose 
paraphrase whereof may be : It is agreed between 
God and the mediator Jesus Christ the Son of God, 
surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that 
the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to inno- 
cent Christ, and he both condemned and put to 
death for them upon this very condition, that who- 
soever heartily consents unto the covenant of recon- 
ciliation offered through Christ shall, by the imputa- 
tion of his obedience unto them, be justified and 
holden righteous before God." But I deem this 
doctrine as much a human development from the 
text, " Christ Jesus came into the world to save sin- 
ners," as the doctrine of priestly absolution is a 
human development from the text, "Whosesoever 
sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them," or the 
doctrine of the real presence from the text, " Take, 
eat, this is my bod3\" 

Dr. Townsend * has remarked that "Conversion 
is not a question of smiles or tears, of sunshine or 
clouds. It is not a question of this or that emotion 

*" Credo," p. 241. 



76 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

or feeling, any more than it is one of time or place. 
It is a simple change of character, through a divine 
agency, induced by religious motives without regard 
to the time or manner of its accomplishment." Let 
us resume Paul's idea of redemption. 

If ever there was a case in which the wonder- 
working power of attachment, in a man for whom 
the moral sympathies and the desire of righteous- 
ness were all-powerfnl, might employ itself and 
work its wonders, it was here. Paul felt this power 
penetrate him ; and he felt, also, how by perfectly 
identifying himself through it with Christ, and in no 
other way, could he ever get the confidence and the 
force to do as Christ did. He thus found a point in 
which the mighty world outside man, and the weak 
world inside him, seemed to combine for his salva- 
tion. The struggling stream of duty, which had 
not volume enough to bear him to his goal, was sud- 
denly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of s^^m- 
pathy and emotion.* 

To this new and potent influence Paul gave the 
name of faith. More fully he calls it "Faith that 
worketh through love,'' The word faith points, no 
doubt, to " coming by hearing," and has possibly a 
reminiscence, for Paul, of his not having with 
his own w^aking e3'es, like the original disciples, 
seen Christ, and of his special mission being to 
Gentiles who had not seen Christ either. But the 
essential meaning of the word is " power of holding 

♦ See " St. Paul and Protestantism,'* already cited at page £6. 



PAUL ON "faith" and "RESURRECTION." 77 

on to the unseen," "fidelity." Other attachments 
demand fidelity in absence of an object which, at 
some time or other, nevertheless has been seen ; this 
attachment demands fidelity to an object which both 
is absent and has never been seen by us. It is 
righth^ called not constancy, but faith ; a power, 
preeminentl}^, of fast attachment to an unseen power 
of goodness, "The law of the spirit of life in 
Christ Jesus," says Paul, "freed me from the law 
of sin and death." This is what is done for us by 
faith. In his tendency to Judaize, however, Paul 
still often uses the term in its general sense. It 
was wTitten of the founder of Israel, Abraham, 
that he believed God and it was counted to him 
for righteousness ; the prophet Habakkuk had the 
famous text : "The just shall live by faith." Christ, 
too, had used and sanctioned the use of the word 
faith to signify cleaving to the unseen God's power 
of goodness as shown in Christ. Peter and John 
and the other apostles habitually used the w^ord in 
the same sense, with the modification introduced by 
Christ's departure. This was "enough to make Paul 
retain for that vital operation, which was the heart 
of his whole religious system, the name of faith, 
though he had considerably developed and enlarged 
the name's usual meaning. To the elemental power 
of sympathy and emotion in us Paul assigns but 
one unalterable object : to die with Christ to the laiv 
of the fleshy to live luith Christ to the law of the mind. 
"If any man be in Christ," said Paul, — that is, if 



/8 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

any man identifies himself with Christ b>- attach- 
ment so that he enters into his feelings and lives 
with his life, — ''he is a new creatnre ;" he can do, 
and does, what Christ did. All impnlses of selfish- 
ness conflict with Christ's feelings, he showed it by 
dying to them all ; if you are one vrith him by faith 
and sympathy, you can die to them also. And if 
you thus die with him, you become transformed by 
the renewing of your mind, and rise with him. The 
lavv' of the spirit of life which is in Chi'ist becomes 
the law of your life also, and frees you from the law 
of sin and death. You rise with hi^n to that harmo- 
nious conformity with the real and eternal order, 
that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, 
which is 1-^e and peace, and which grows more and 
more till it becomes glory. If you suffer with him 
therefore, you shall also be glorified with him. 

Furthermore, Christ's life, with which we by faith 
identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration 
with the eternal order is not satisfied, so long as 
only Christ himself follows this order, or only this 
or that individual amongst us follows it. The same 
law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which pre- 
vails in our inward self-discipline, is to prevail in 
our dealings with others. K my neighbor is mereh' 
an extension of m3'self, deceiving my neighbor is 
the same as deceiving m^'self. '-Speak every man 
truth to his neighbor," says Paul, ''\for we are mem. 
bers one of another." 

In Paul's ideas, then, the expression re5?rrrec^/o?i 



PAUL ON ''faith" and ''RESURRECTION." 79 

from the dead has no essential connection with phys- 
ical death. While it cannot be denied that in his 
earlier theolog}^, the physical and miraculous aspect 
of the resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's, 
is predominant, his conception of life and death 
inevitably came to govern his conception of the res- 
urrection. "If 3'e then be risen with Christ," says 
he to the Collossians, " seek the things that are 
above." And he tells the Romans that real life 
begins with the mystical death which frees us from 
the slwlls and shcdl-nots of the law.* The resurrec- 
tion Paul was striving after for himself and others 
w^as one oioiv and to righteousness ; the putting on of 
the new man. 

But the Christian needs to find in Christ's dying 
to sin a fellowship of suffering and conformity to 
death ; this he touches in Christ's crucifixion, — here 
only can we see, in Christ, place for struggle and 
weakness. The believer is crucified with Christ 
when he mortifies by the spirit the deeds of right- 
eousness ; Christ was crucified when he came not to 
do his own will but God's. 

Even in this life, we are "seated in heavenly- 
places, " as Christ is ; so entirely, for Paul, is right- 
eousness the true life and the true heaven. At our 
physical death, however, we quit the ground of ex- 
perience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, 
by a sublime analog}^, he fetches from the travail of 
the whole universe proof of the necessity and benefi- 

* Rom. vii. 1-6. 



80 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

cence of the law of transformation. Christ entered 
into his glory when he had made his ph3'sical death 
itself a crowning witness to his obedience to right- 
eousness ; we, in like manner, within the limits of 
this earthl}^ life and before we have 3'et persevered 
to the end, must not look for full adoption, for the 
glorious revelation in us of the sons of God. 

Very natural^, then might Paul affirm that peace 
with God through Christ inspires such an abounding 
sense of gratitude, and of its not being our work, 
that we can only speak of ourselves as called and 
chosen to it. But here, again is disclosed Paul's 
tendency to Judaize, in the use of a stock theolog- 
ical figure, — that of the clay and the potter, — 
adopted by Isaiah, Jeremiah and the son of Sirach, 
But this was onl}' secondary to his main point : 
" God is the saviour of all men, especially of those 
that believe." 

In the Epistle to the Hebrews appears a different 
view of the death of Christ, namely, as analogous 
to the Jewish s^^stem of sacrifices. Luther's con- 
jecture which ascribes that epistle to Apollos, derives 
corroboration from one account of Apollos which we 
have ; that ' ' he was an eloquent man and mighty in 
the Scriptures." In the author of that epistle, the 
powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding 
seem somewhat to have dominated the religions per- 
ceptions. What the true expiation was is well 
stated in the first epistle of St. Paul. Christ has to 
step between us foolish transgressors and the de- 



PAUL ON ''faith" AND "RESURRECTION." 81 

structive natural consequences of our transgression, 
and, by a super-human example, a spending himself 
without stint, a more than mortal scale of justice 
and j)urit3^, to save the ideal of human life and con- 
duct from the deterioration with which men's ordi- 
nary practice threatens it. In this way Christ 
truly "became for our sakes poor, though he was 
rich," he was truly "bruised for our iniquities," he 
"suffered in our behalf," "bare the sin of many," and 
"made intercession for the transgressors;" in this 
way, he was "sacrificed as a blameless lamb to redeem 
us from the vain conversation which had become our 
second nature ;" in this way, he who knew no sin 
'* was made to be sin for us." 



XIII. 

•'EXPERIENCING RELIGION." 

One would suppose from the manner in which 
some preachers exhort us to "Have Faith!" that 
they mean, "Have Credulity!" We have seen 
what was PauFs maturer idea thereof based on his re- 
ligious experience. We had once referred to religion 
"in its wide sense of piety and goodness." This, 
however, does not reach the gist of some modern 
exhortations to " Get Religion !" 

But what is the object of religion? Condition, 
conduct. Now rightness of conduct is the simplest 
thing in the world so far as understanding is con- 
cerned ; but as regards doing^ it is the hardest thing 
in the world. Hence, instead of facing the latter, 
men have preferred to occup}' themselves with ab- 
struse disquisitions on the former, the origin of con- 
science, &c. Conduct is three-fourths of life ; in- 
deed, what of knowledge, art, &c., does not concern 
conduct may safely be called much less than one- 
fourth.* 

Religion differs from morality in degree. Reli- 
gion is morality touched by emotion. For instance, 
when Cicero says : " Hold off from sensuality ; for, 
if you have given yourself up to it, you will find 

♦ see "Literature and Dogma," already cited on page 32. 



''experiencing religion." 83 

yourself unable to think of anything else ! " this is 
moralit}'. But when Jesus says ; '' Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God ! '' this is reli- 
gion. ''Love not sleep, lest thou come to pover- 
ty ! " is morality. ' ' My meat is to do the will of 
him that sent me, and to finish his work ! " is reli- 
gion. So also is the aspiration of Sophocles ; " O 
that my lot might lead me in the path of holy inno- 
cence of thought and deed, the path which august 
laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had 
their birth, neither did the race of mortal man be- 
get them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep ; 
the power of God is mighty in them and groweth 
not old." 

How is this application of emotion to morality 
made ? Only by attending to any matter does one 
get to feel much about it. Only by habitually dwell- 
ing on conduct, does the mind arrive at rules deter- 
mining the control of the impulses of the animal in- 
stincts. Thus it was that the Hebrew nation at- 
tained the idea of an eternal power not ourselves 
that m.akes for righteousness. This consciousness 
came from experience, in the plain region of con- 
duct ; not, as metaphysicians assert, from Israel's 
having his head full of the necessity of a first cause. 
"The fear of the eternal," he is always telling us, 
"that is wisdom; and to depart from evil that is 
understanding. Happy is the man that findeth wis- 
dom." '*The Eternal b}^ wisdom hath founded the 
earth, by understanding hath he established the 



84 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

heavens/' He comes to consider God a father, be- 
cause the power in and around us. which makes for 
righteousness, is best described by the name of this 
authoritative and tender relation. So, too, with the 
intense fear and abhorrence of idolatry. Conduct, 
righteousness, is, above all, an inward motion and 
rule ; no sensible forms can represent it or help us 
to it. So, too, w^ith the sense of the oneness of God. 
''The Lord our God is one Lord;" He has not 
frail man's man^^-sidedness. "Let thine eyes 
look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight be- 
for thee ; turn not to the right hand nor to the left ; 
remove thy foot from evil !'' 

Now, the w^ord "God" literally signifies bril- 
liance. It is used, however, in most cases as by no 
means a term of science, or exact knowledge, but a 
term of poetry and eloquence ; a term thrown out, so 
to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speak- 
er's consciousness ; and mankind mean different 
things by it as their consciousness differs. The most 
exact scientific definition of a thing is not always 
the best aid to our conception of its character. Ge- 
ographers call the earth an oblate ..spheroid. But 
Wordsworth's expression, "the mighty mother of 
mankind," is more adequate to convey what men 
feel about the earth. When Paul sa3's our business 
is " to serve the spirit of God," "to serve the liv- 
ing and true God," and when Epictetus says, "What 
do I want? to acquaint myself with the true order 
of things and comply with it," — they both mean, so 



I 



''EXPERIENCING RELIGION. 85 

far, the same, in that they both mean we should obey 
a tendency, which is not ourselves^ but which appears 
in our consciousness, by which things fulfill the real 
law of their being. And Israel's fundamental idea 
was " righteousness tendeth to life, and he that pur- 
sueth evil pursueth it to his own death." 

But, as Goethe has remarked, "man never knows 
how anthropomorphic he is." This not ourselves of 
which Israel is thankfully conscious, he inevitably 
speaks of and speaks to as a man. As time pro- 
ceeds, imagination and reasoning keep working upon 
this substructure, and build from it a manifold and 
non-natural man. Attention is then drawn, after- 
wards, to causes outside of ourselves which seem to 
make for sin and suffering ; and then either these 
causes have to be reconciled by some highly ingenious 
scheme with the magnified and non-natural man's 
power, or a second magnified and non-natural man 
has to be supposed who pulls the contrary way to 
the first. So arise Satan and his angels. But all 
this is secondary, and comes much later ; Israel be- 
gan with experience. 

The prophets themselves, speaking when the ruin 
of their country was impending, or soon after it had 
happened, had had in prospect the actual restoration 
of Jerusalem, the submission of the nations around, 
and the empire of David and Solomon renewed. 
But as time went on, and Israel's return from cap- 
tivity and resettlement of Jerusalem b}^ no means 
answered his glowing anticipations from them, these 



86 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

anticipations had more and more a construction put 
upon them which set at defiance the unworthiness 
and infelicities of the actual present, which filled up 
what prophecy left in outline, and which embraced 
the world. The Hebrew Amos, of the eighth cen- 
tury before Christ, promises to his hearers a recov- 
ery from their ruin, in which they shall possess the 
remnant of Edom : the Greek Amos of the Chris- 
tian era, whose words St. James produces in the 
conference at Jerusalem, promises a recovery for 
Israel in which the residue of men shall seek the 
Eternal. This is but a specimen of what went for- 
ward on a large scale. The redeemer, whom the 
unknown prophet of the captivity foretold to Zion, 
has, a few hundred years later, for the writer whom 
we call Daniel and for his contemporaries, become 
the miraculous agent of Israel's new restoration, the 
heaven-sent executor of the Eternal's judgment, and 
the bringer-in of the kingdom of righteousness ; the 
Messiah, in short, of our popular religion. '^ One 
like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, 
and came to the Ancient of Da3's, and there was 
given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that 
peoples, nations and languages should serve him ; 
xmd the kingdom and dominion shall be given to the 
23eople of the saints of the Most High." An impar- 
tial criticism will hardly find in the Old Testament 
writers before the times of the Maccabees the doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul, or the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. But by the time of the Macca- 



" EXPERIENCING RELIGION." 87 

bees, when this passage of the book of Daniel was 
written, in the second century before Christ, the 
Jews have undoubtedly become familiar, not indeed 
with the idea of the immortality of the soul as phi- 
losophers like Plato conceived it, but with the notion 
of the resurrection of the dead to take their trial for 
acceptance or rejection in the Messiah's judgment 
and kingdom. 

To this has swelled Israel's original and fruitful 
thesis : ' ' Righteousaess tendeth to life ! as the 
whirlwind passe th, so is the wicked no more, but the 
righteous is an everlasting foundation." The phan- 
tasmagories of more prodigal and wild imaginations 
have mingled with the work of Israel's austere spirit ; 
Babylon, Persia, Egypt and Greece have left their 
trace there ; but the unchangeable substructure is 
everything built which comes after. 

In one sense, the lofty Messianic ideas of "the 
day of the Eternal's coming," the consolation of Is- 
rael," "the. restitution of all things," are even more 
important than the solid but humbler idea, " Right- 
eousness tendeth to life," out of which they arose ; in 
another sense they are much less important. Thej^ 
are more important, because they are tlie develop- 
ment of this idea and prove its strenth. It miglit 
have been crushed and baffled by the falsification 
events seemed to delight in giving it ; that instead 
of beiug crushed and baffled, it took this magnifi- 
cent flight, shows its innate power. And they also 
in a wonderful manner attract emotion to the ideas 



88 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

of conduct and moralit}^^ attract it to them and com 
bine it with them. On the other hand, the idea tha< 
"^ righteousness tendeth to life" has a firm, experi 
Tiental ground, which the Messianic ideas have not 
And the day comes when the possession of such a 
ground is invakiable. 

That the spirit of man should entertain hopes and 
anticipations beyond what it actuallj^ knows and can 
verify is quite natural. Human life could not have 
the scope, and depth, and progress it has, were this 
otherwise. It is natural, too, to make these hopes 
and anticipations give in their turn support to the 
simple and humble experience which was their orig- 
inal ground. Israel, therefore, who originally fol- 
lowed righteousness because he felt that it tended to 
life, might come at last to follow it because it would 
enable him to stand before the Son of Man at his 
coming, and to share in the triumph of the saints. 

But this later belief has not the same character 
as the belief which it is thus set to confirm. It is a 
kind of fairy-tale, which a man tells himself, which 
no one, we grant, can prove impossible to turn out 
true, but which no one, also, can prove certain to 
turn out true. As Goethe has said, "extra-be- 
lief,'' {der Aherglaube^) — that which we hope, augur, 
imagine — " is the poetr}^ of life," and has the rights 
of poetry. But it is not science ; and yet it tends 
always to imagine itself science, to substitute itself 
for science, to make itself the ground of the very 
science out of which it has grown. 



PROPHECY AND RHAPSODY. 

Such then, as years rolled on, was the depreciation 
of the emotive element, and by the time of Christ 
"the whole head was sick and the whole heart 
faint." And now the thing was, by giving a fuller 
idea of righteousness, to reapply emotion to it, and 
thereby to disperse the feeling of being amiss and 
helpless, to give the sense of being right and effec- 
tive ; to restore, in short, to righteousness the sanc- 
tion of happiness. But this could only be done by 
attending to that inward world of feelings and dis- 
positions which Judaism had too much neglected. 
The first need, therefore, for Israel at that time, was 
to make religion cease to be mainly a national and 
social matter, and become mainly a personal matter. 
" Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the 
cup, that the outside ma}^ be clean also !" — this was 
the very ground principle in Christ's teaching. 

Christ's new and different way of putting things 
was the secret of his succeeding where the prophets 
could not. This new way was expressed by St. 
James as epieikeia^ sweet-reasonableness, balance, 
mild temper. That which has an air of truth and 
lil^elihood is prepossessing. Now, never were utter- 
ances concernins: conduct and righteousness — Is- 



90 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

raeVs master-concern, and the master topic of the 
New Testament as well as the Old — which so car- 
ried with them an air of consummate truth and likeli- 
hood as Christ's did ; and never, therefore, were 
an}" utterances so irresistabl}' prepossessing.* He 
put things in such a way that his hearer was led to 
take each rule or fact of conduct b}^ its inward 
side, its effect on the heart and character ; then the 
reason of the thing, the meaning of what had been 
mere matter of blind rule, flashed upon him. He 
could distinguish between what was only ceremon}', 
and v/hat was conduct ; and the hardest rule of con- 
duct came to appear to him infinitel}' reasonable and 
therefore infinitely prepossessing. To find his oiuii 
soid^ his true and permanent self, became set up in 
man's view as his chief concern, as the secret of 
happiness; and so it real!}' is. '-How is a man 
advantaged if he gain the whole world and suffer 
the loss of himself?^' was the searching question 
which Jesus made men ask themselves. He made 
his followers feel that they had a best and real self 
as opposed to their ordinary and apparent one, and 
that their happiness depended on saving this best 
self from being overborne. And then by recom- 
mending and still more by himself exemplif\ing in 
his own practice by the exhibition in himself with 
the most prepossessing pureness, clearness, and 

* " In this frail and corrupt world we sometimes meet i^ersons 
vrlio in tlieir very mien and aspect, as well as in the whole habit 
of life, manifest such a signature and stamp of virtue as to make 
our judgment of them a matter of intuition rather than the re- 
sult of continued examination."— Alexa^'DER Kxox: in 
Southey's Life of Wesley. 



PROPHECY AND RHAPSODY. 91 

beauty of the two qualities by which our ordinar}' 
self is indeed most essentially counteracted, self 're- 
nouncement and. mildness^ he made his followers feel 
that in these qualities lay the secret of their best 
self; that to attain them was in the highest degree 
requisite and natural, that a man's whole happiness 
depended upon it. 

It cannot be said that by the suffering Servant of 
God and by the triumphant Messiah, the prophets 
themselves meant one and the same person. But 
language of hope and aspiration such as theirs is in 
its very nature malleable. Criticism ma}- and must 
determine w^hat the original speakers seem to have 
directly meant ; but the very nature of their lan- 
guage justifies any powerful and fruitful application 
of it, and every such application may be said, in 
the words of popular religion, to have been lodged 
there from the first by the spirit of God. Certainly 
it was a somewhat violent exegetical proceeding to 
fuse together into one personage Daniel's Son of 
Man coming with the clouds of heaven, the first 
Isaiah's ''Branch out of the root of Jesse," who 
should smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and 
reign in glory, peace, and righteousness, and the 
second Isaiah's meek and afflicted Servant of God, 
who w^as charged with the precious message of a 
golden future ; — to fuse together in one these three 
by no means identical personages, to add to them 
the sacrificial lamb of the passover and of the tem- 
ple-service which was constantly before a Jew's eyes, 



92 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

to add, besides, the Prophet like to himself whom 
Moses promised to the children of Israel, to add, 
further, the Holy One of Israel the Redeemer, who 
for the prophets was the Eternal himself; and to 
say, that the combination thence resulting was the 
Messiah or Christ w^hom all the prophets meant and 
predicted, and that Jesus was this Messiah. To us, 
who have been fashioned b}^ a theology whose set 
purpose is to efface all the diJBSculties in such a com- 
bination, and to make it received easily and unhes- 
itatingly, it ma}^ appear natural ; in itself, and with 
the elements of which it is composed viewed singly 
and impartialh', it cannot but be declared violent 

Instead of " the Root of David who should set up 
an ensign for the nations and assemble the outcasts 
of Israel,'^ Christ took from prophec}' and made pre- 
eminent '' the Servant whom man despiseth and the 
people abhorreth," but " who bringeth good tidings, 
who publisheth peace, publisheth salvation." And 
instead of sa^^ing like the prophets, ''This people 
must mend, this nation must do so and so, Israel 
must follow such and such ways," Christ took the 
individual Israelite b}' himself apart, made him lis- 
ten for the voice of his conscience, and said to him 
in effect, " If ever}' one would mend one^ we should 
have a new world." 

The W'Orkings of later extra-belief are illustrated 
in an interpretation of Jacob's death-bed words as 
that " the sceptre shall not depart from Judah until 
Shiloh (or the Messiah) come," &c. The passage 



PROPHECY AND RHAPSODY. 93 

is rightly to be rendered that ' ' the preeminence 
shall not depart from Judah so long as the people 
resort to Shiloh (the national sanctuarj^ before Jeru- 
salem was won) ; and the nations (the heathen Ca- 
nanites) shall obey him." Jeremiah's passage as to 
the ''Branch" runs really: "I will raise to David 
a righteous branch ; in his days Judah shall be 
saved and Israel shall dwell safeh- ; and this is the 
name whereby they shall call themselves : The Eter- 
nal is our righteousness ! " Another passage : "The 
Eternal said unto my lord the king," is a simple 
promise of victory to a prince among God's chosen 
people. And another : " Kiss the Son ! " is, accord- 
ing to the Septuagint, "Lay hold on instruction!" 
Again, certain miraculous stories afford an illus- 
tration of this tendenc3\ Men's habits of seeing, 
sifting and relating are thus described by Shake- 
speare : 

"No natural exhalation in the sky, 

No scape of nature, no distempered day, 

No common wind, no customed event, 

But they will pluck away his natural cause, 

And call them meteors, prodigies and signs. 

Abortions, presages, and tongues of heaven." 

The story of the miraculous passage of the Pam- 
phylian Sea by the hosts of Alexander the Great is 
received witout considering whether that part of the 
Mediterranean might not have been depressed by 
long-continued north winds. The companion of St. 
Aquinas is believed by many well-meaning persons 
to have heard a voice from the crucifix to the pray- 
ing saint : ''Thou hast, written well of me, Thomas ; 
what recompense dost thou desire?" Our honest be- 



94 k VOICE FROM TUE PEWS. 

lief that Stanifortli related in good faith a vision by 
him of Christ upon the cross does not prevent a be- 
lief that some of his opinions on other subjects 
might be erroneous. So also as to the declarations 
of St. Peter,* St. John,t and St. James4 that the 
end of all things was in their day impending. So 
also as to St. Paul's assertion to the Thessalonians 
that they and he, at the coming of Christ, then sup- 
posed to be approaching, should have their turn 
after and not before the faithful dead, and at once 
he caught up ' ' in the clouds to meet the Lord in the 
air." 

Sometimes under the hands of the reporters the 
texture of incidents becomes so loose and floating 
that we stand momentarily in wonderland. Jesus 
after his resurrection not known by Mary Magda- 
lene, taken by her for the gardener ; not known hy 
the two disciples going with him to Emmaus and at 
supper with him there ; not known by his most inti- 
mate apostles on the borders of the sea of Galilee ; 
— and presently, out of these vague beginnings, the 
recognitions getting asserted, then the ocular dem- 
onstrations, the supreme commissions, the ascen- 
sion ; — one hardly knows which of the two to call 
the most evident here, the perfect simplicity and 
good faith of the narrators, or the plainness with 
which they themselves really say to us, Behold a 
legend growing under your eyes ! 

* I. Pet., iv. 7. 1 1. John, ii. 18. t James, v. 8. 



I XV. 

I 

APPREHENDING CHRIST. 

Proceed we, then, with three facts distinctly be- 
fore us : first that the record of Christ's life and 
words, when we first get it has passed through at 
least half a century, or more, of oral tradition, and 
through more than one written account ; second, 
that it is impossible for us to know accurately the 
history of the documents, and even if it were possi- 
ble, we should yet not know accurately -wlfSit Jesus 
said and did, for his reportors were incapable of 
rendering it, he was so much above them ; and third, 
that he spoke in Aramaic, the most concrete and 
unmetaphysical of languages but he is reported in 
Greek, the most metaphysical. Still we may trace 
approximately and satisfactorily what he actually 
Uxd say and do to restore from the obscurations of 
this materializing extra-belief Israel's original intui- 
tion, that " the Eternal loveth righteousness ; to him 
that ordereth his conversation right shall be shown 
the salvation of God." His method was introspec- 
tion, his secret or means was self-renouncement, and 
his manner was " epieikeia," a something ''full of 
grace and truth." 

His method directed the disciple's eye inward and 



96 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS, 

set his consciousness to work ; * and the first thing 
his consciousness told him was that he had two 
selves pulling him different ways. When we attend, 
we find that an impulse to do a thing is really in it- 
self no reason at all why we should do it ; because 
impulses proceed from two sources, quite different, 
and of quite different degrees of authority. St. 
Paul contrasts them as the inward man, and the man 
in our members ; the mind of the flesh and the spir- 
itual mind. Jesus contrasts them as Zz/e, properly 
so named, and life in this ivorld; the former full of 
light, endurance, felicity, in connection with the 
higher and permanent self ; the latter in connection 
with the lower and transient self. And the means 
by w^hich a man may be placed in the former was by 
dying to the latter. "Whosoever w^ould come af- 
ter me, let him renounce himself," Let him die as 
regards his old self, and so live. And this was what 
Paul meant by bearing about the dying (the necro- 
sis) of the Lord Jesus that the life also of Jesus 
may be made manifest in our bod3\" By the '' him- 
self" to be renounced — the ••' old man" to be put off 
^ — the life in this world — was meant following those 
"wishes of the flesh" and of the current thoughts, f 
wdiich Jesus had, by his method, already put his 
disciples in the way of sifting and scrutinizing, and 

* " The decisive juncture is even before 

' Desire has trimmed the sails and Circumstance 
Brings but the breeze to fiU them.' " 

"When una verted was David's look at Bathsheba, then una- 
verted was the assassination of Uriah." 

fEph. ii.3. 



APPREHENDING CHRIST. 97 

of trying by the standard of conformity to con- 
science. Accordingly, when Jesus said of himself: 
''Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay 
down my life that I may take it again,'' he appealed 
to that happiness which is the experimental sanc- 
tion of his method and of his secret, — the sense it 
gives of having the Eternal on our side and approv- 
ing us. Thus the words "peace through Jesus 
Christ" would mean peace through this secret of his. 
But in the extra-belief of our popular theurgy, 
Christ's being loved b}^ the Father for laying down 
his life has been materialized inio a First Person's 
approving a Second for standing to a contract 
passed in a council of a Trinity. 

Well might Jesus call the religion of the true 
Israel "good news to the poor;" for it covers 
nearly the whole of life and yet is so simple. The 
only right contrast to set up between faith and rea- 
son is, not that faith grasps what is too hard for rea- 
son, but that reason does not, like faith, attend to 
what is at once so great and so simple. The diffi- 
culty about faith is to attend to what is very simple 
and very important, but liable to be pushed by more 
showy or tempting matters out of sight ; the mar- 
vel about faith is, that what is so simple should be 
so all-sufficing, so necessary, and so often neglected. 
And faith is neither the submission of the reason, 
nor is it the acceptance, simply and absolutely upon 
testimon}^, of what reason cannot reach. Faith is : 
the being able to cleave to a power of goodness 



98 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

appealing to our higher and real self, not to oui 
lower or apparent self.* 

Nearly eight centuries before Christ, Micah had 
asked: " Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, 
and bow myself before the high God ?" The author 
of the epistle to the Hebrews * answers : "With 
the blood of Christ/' But without the extra-belief 
in Imputed or proxy merit or sacrificial ceremonies 
which would characterize '• an eloquent man and 
mighty in the Scriptures" (so reputed perhaps be- 
cause eloquently catering to the Time-spirit,) Micah 
had himself given the onl}' answer verifiable : " He 
hath showed thee, Oman, what is good; and what 
doth the Eternal require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mere}', and to walk humbly with thy 
God?" 

* ^'The Religion which depends on reverence [Ehrfurcht, honor 
done without fear,] for what is above us we denominate the Eth- 
nic; it is the religion of the nations, and the tirst happy deliver- 
ance from a degrading fear: all Heathen religions as we call 
them, are of this sort, whatsoever names they may bear. The 
Second Religion, which founds itself on reverence for what is 
around us, we denominate the Philosophical; for the philoso- 
pher stations himself in the middle, and must draw do\vn to him 
all that is higher, and up to him all that is lower, and only in 
this medium condition does he merit the title of Wise. Here, as 
he surveys with clear sight his relation to his equals, and there- 
fore to the whole human race, his relation likewise to all other 
earthly circumstances and arrangements necessary or acciden- 
tal, he alone in a cosmic sense lives in Truth. But now we have 
to speak of a Third Religion, grounded on reverence for what is 
beneath us: this we name the Christian, as in the Christian re- 
ligion such a temper is with most distinctness manifested : it is 
a last step to which mankind were fitted and destined to attain. 
But what a task was it, not only to be patient with the Earth, 
and let it lie beneath us, we appealing to a higher birth-place ; 
but also to recognize humility and poverty, mockery and despite, 
disgrace and wretchedness, suffering and death, to recognize 
these things as divine ; nay even on sin and crime to look not as 
hindrances, but to honor and love them as furtherances of what 
is holy,"— Goethe, in " Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship." 



XVI. 

GOD. 

But what does Micah mean by ''thy God ? " Ev- 
idently something else than a mere magnified and 
non-natural man. There are many qualities of God 
not knowable by us. Bnt our idea of him may be 
true as far as it goes. We can conceive him to be 
dififerent in kind from the universe ; He being infi- 
nite, self-subsisting and unchanging. He trans- 
cends the world of matter and the world of spirit ; 
and in virtue of that transcendence continually 
makes the world of matter fairer, and the world of 
spirit wiser. So there is really a progress in the 
manifestation of God, although no progress in God. 

The infinite God must be complete in the qualities 
of a perfect being and perfect in the qualities of a 
complete one. He must have the perfection of be- 
ing, self-existence ; of power, almightiness ; of 
mind, all-knowingness ; of conscience, all-right- 
eousness ; of affection, all-lovingness ; of soul, all- 
holiness, perfect self-fidelity, — consequently the per- 
fection of will, absolute freedom. 

The universe consists of the world of matter and 
the world of spirit. In the world of matter — nature 
— God must be both perfect cause and perfect prov- 
idence. As to such cause : God being the undis- 



100 K VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

turbed author of all that is in nature, nature repre- 
sents nothing but his will and purpose. He must 
have made nature from a perfect motive ; of perfect 
material ; for a perfect purpose or end ; and as per- 
fect means to achieve that purpose. That motive 
is absolute love, a desire to confer such form and de- 
gree of welfare on each thing as is perfectly consist- 
ent with the character of the thing — with its highest 
form of welfare. A perfect purpose or end is the 
achievement of that welfare and bliss. Perfect ma- 
terial and means are those which perfectly achieve 
that purpose — not today, or w^hen the thing wills, 
but ultimatel}^ when the infinite wisdom and love of 
God wills. It follows, then, that God, being infin- 
itely wise, just, loving and hol}^ creates nothing 
from an evil or imperfect motive, for an evil or im- 
perfect purpose, from an evil or imperfect material, 
or as evil or imperfect means ; and, consequently, 
to him, selfishness and destructiveness are abso- 
lutely impossible. 

And the same holds as to the perfection of God's 
providence ; for creation and providence are but mod- 
ifications of the same function. Creation is momen- 
tary providence, providence momentary creation ; 
one a point, the other a line. At creation God must 
have known the action and history of each thing 
which he called into being just as well as he knows 
it now ; for God's knowledge is not a becoming 
wise by experience, but a being wise by nature. It 
follows, then, that all things which God has made 



GOD. 101 

have a right to be perfectly provided for. This lien 
on the infinity of God vests in the substance of 
their finite nature, and is not voided by any acci- 
dent of their history, for that accident must have 
been known and provided for as one of the conse- 
quences of their powers. If, then, I am sure of 
God and his infinit}', I am sure beforehand of the 
ultimate welfare of everything which God has 
made ; the infinite Father is the endorser therefor. 
God being unchangeably perfect and perfectly un- 
changeable, his mode of action is constant and uni- 
versal ; nowhere is there an extemporaneous mira- 
cle. Men have their precarious makeshifts ; the In- 
finite has no tricks and subterfuges — not a whim in 
God, and so, in one regard, not a miracle in Nature. 
Seeming chance is real direction ; what looks like 
evil in nature is real good. The sparrow that falls 
today does not fall to ruin but to ultimate welfare. 
Though w^e know not the mode of operation, there 
must be another world for the sparrow as for the 
man. 

In the w^orld of spirit, or man, God is perfect 
cause and perfect Providence. God knew at the 
creation all the action and history of the world of 
man. Human caprice and freedom are a contingent 
force, but God knows its amount and movements 
and what it will bring about. There have been and 
there are, to nations and to individuals, suflTering, 
follies, sins ; but these were all foreseen by the infi- 
nite vv^isdom of God, and provided for by his infinite 



102 A. VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

power and justice, and His infinite love shall bring 
us all to bliss, not a soul left behind, not a sparrow 
lost. The means we know not, the end we are 
sure of. If God is for us who can be against us? * 

* See more f uUy, Theodore Parker's Sermon on " Theism," 



BENEFIT OF PRAYER, SUBJECTIVE. 

But then, observe my reservation: "in one re- 
gard, no miracle in nature." Hume's declaration 
that it is contrary to our experience that a miracle 
take place, is no very absolute denial of miracles. 
If a miracle be considered merely as a new effect 
produced by the introduction of a new cause, all 
that Hume has made out is that, (at least, in the im- 
perfect state of our knowledge of natural agencies, 
which leaves it always possible that some of the 
ph3^sical antecedents may have been hidden from 
us,) no evidence can prove a miracle to any one 
who did not previously believe the existence of a 
Being with supernatural power ; or who believes 
himself to have full proof that the character of the 
Being whom he recognizes is inconsistent with His 
having seen fit to interfere on the occasion in question. 
Mankind agree with Aristotle in conceding the truth 
of Agathon's averment : " It is a part of probability 
that many improbable things will happen." A 
great deal of what passes for likelihood in the world 
is simply the reflex of a wish. Accordingly, there 
have been priests who seemed to argue that the dog- 
ma of the resuscitation of the Virgin Mary was true 
because it had been a solace to many pious souls. 



104 A. VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

The difference between a fool and a philosopher 
has been said to lie in the fact that the fool is more 
willing to accei^t unreal causes of any phenomena 
than to confess to himself his ignorance of the real 
ones. Hence the frequencj^ of the fallacy post 7ioc 
(or cum hoc) ergo propter hoc; such an event fol- 
lowed, therefore it must have resulted from, the an- 
tecedent. Hence the silly belief in omens, dream- 
auguries, and all that ilk. The one instance of a 
sequitur is treasured as a fulfilment ; the ninet3^-nine 
of non constat are consigned to oblivion. And 
hence the perversion of prayer. Pharisees love to 
think that the tower of Siloam falls only on '' Sin- 
ners." Sunday pleasure boats upset ; they alwaj's 
do, aud none others, forsooth. Not alone Mark 
Twain's " Innocents Abroad" or inmates of a steam- 
ship have witnessed incessant prayers for winds fa- 
vorable to "our" craft, ignoring the fact that ten- 
fold vessels — vessels propelled by sails alone — ^are, 
at the same time in the same commercial belt, com- 
ing in an opposite direction. Prayers, too, by per- 
sons professing to love their neighbors as them- 
selves. 

Presumptuous is any prayer that assumes to in- 
struct God. Pernicious is the oft-reiterated pulpit 
assertion that the duty, aim and benefit of prayer is 
objective. They are subjective. The world has en- 
dorsed two proverbs: ''what you wish, that you 
are," and " As a man thinketh in his heart, so is 
he." No one absolutely wishes to be submissive, 



BENEFIT OF PRAYER, SUBJECTIVE. 105 

patient, modest, or liberal who does not become, or, 
at least tend to become, what he wishes. The man 
who never by sequestration and contemplation in- 
terrupts the giddy whirl of his secular pursuits be- 
comes a groveller. The woman who is forever ab- 
sorbed in frivolities, becomes inane. The vindic- 
tive tribe or individual who delights to imagine that 
his shoe is being cast out over every vexatious 
Edom, hurts himself and not Edom ; Especially if 
Edom, like the moon when barked at, '' keeps right 
on." The law of assimulation is immutable. To 
be Godlike we must meditate upon God. To attain 
towards his attributes we must aspire to the true, 
the beautiful and the good. And, as George Elliot 
has remarked in her '' Daniel Deronda," " the most 
powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the 
pra^'er which seeks for nothing special, but is a 
yearning to escape from the limitations of our own 
weakness, and an invocation of all Good to enter 
and abide with us ; or else a self-oblivious lifting up 
of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good ex- 
ists ; both the yearning and the exultation gathering 
their utmost force from the sense of communion in a 
form which has expressed them both, for long gener- 
ations of struggling men." 

Such persistent aspiration is my definition of 
prayer. Christ's vivid oriental emphasis meant no 
more. All his application of the parable of the un- 
just judge has probably never come down to us. 
Whoever of his reporters would imply that he ever 



106 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS, 

affirmed that prayer consists in selfish teasing and 
impertinence, is not a safe guide.* 

One may even commend the objective theory 
while having in view only the subjective good. 
The father in La Fontaine's fable, is not deemed 
disingenuous for directing his sons to keep the heri- 
tage and dig for a concealed treasure. The treasure 
was in the digging and consequent health, harvests, 
habits of industry ; a prosperity which the object 
directly longed for would have defeated. 

The wisdom of all ages and countries concurs in 
the counsel : 

** Think true and speak as you think ; 
Intend right and act as you intend : 
Feel kind and be as you feel ; 
Aspire infinitely and grow holy.'* 

♦See Appendix "A." 



FASTING. 

Again : we should not forget, that the same apos- 
tles who appear to recommend prayer and fasting 
from the teasing or objective standpoint, ever evince 
that they have the subjective benefit in view. Thus 
" Pray without ceasing," is a direction to maintain 
a habitually humble and prayerful spirit. 

**' We seem to live a double life, 
Like one in wakeful slumber walking ; 

Vacant we join earth's daily strife, 
The heart meanwhile with angels talking: 

Above, the stream that all behold. 
Acts, words, a restless mingled torrent; 

Below, o'er sands of priceless gold, 
Flows meditation's under-current. 

Paul never advised a waste effort at a physical 
impossibility. So also as to fasting. Pertinent 
was the Hibernian's reply to a priest who had com- 
mended the example of Simon Stilytes : "If ivery- 
body were pillar-saints, how would the rest get 
victuals up to thim?" Our Creator has himself 
fixed the limit at which we may postpone a meal for 
meditation, — the nutriment of the body for the nu- 
triment of the soul. The great truth enunciated by 
the old Hebrew : " It is better to go to the house 



108 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

of mourning than to the house of feasting/^ or by 
Shakespeare : 

<* My desolation does begin 
To make a better life," 

'' the living" may too much '• la}' to heart.'' 

The Presbytery of Edinburgh, in 1853, petitioned 
the Queen to appoint a national fast for the extermi- 
nation of the Asiatic cholera then raging there. 
The Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, replied, 
that the affairs of this world are regulated by 
natural laws, on the observance or neglect of which 
the weal or woe of mankind depends ; that one of 
those laws connects disease with the exhalations of 
bodies ; and it is b}' virtue of this law that conta- 
gion spreads, either in crowded cities, or in places 
where vegetable decomposition is going on ; that 
man, by exerting himself can disperse or neutral- 
ize these noxious influences ; and the appearance 
of the cholera proves that he has not exerted him- 
self. Knowing that such a fast would in Scotland 
be sure to be rigidly kept, and by causing mental 
depression and physical exhaustion prepare thou- 
sands of delicate persons, before twenty-four hours 
had passed, to receive the deadly poison already 
lurking around them, he advised the petitioners to 
employ their time in planning and executing meas- 
ures for purifj'ing the localities of the poorer classes 
from those sources of contagion which, if allowed 
to remain, would "infallibly breed pestilence and 
be fruitful in death, in spite of all the prayers and 
fastings of a united but inactive nation.'' 



FASTING. 109 

In a single church at Edinburgh, in 1670, thirty 
sermons were delivered every week. In 1653, when 
the sacrament vfas administered, the Presbj^terians, 
on Wednesday, fasted and listened to prayers and 
sermons for more than eight hours ; on Saturday 
they heard two or three sermons ; on Sunday they 
stayed in church more than twelve hours ; and on 
Monda}^, three or four additional sermons were 
preached by wa}^ of Thanksgiving. 

Not our Scotch brethren, however, are the only 
disciples who, on going upon a mount of transfig- 
uration, have proposed to build tabernacles and 
abide there. But as the Master suggested, we are 
not created always to remain on those spiritual 
heights. All that is required is that we be faithful 
to the pattern shown us up there. Each element 
of our spiritual nature must have a fair chance. 
One thought and word must succeed another. Our 
creator has made the souFs palate crave, no less 
than the bodily stomach, variety. The allegro is 
all the more pleasing for the andante ; and con- 
versely ''The Last Rose of Summer" is a relief 
after " Fisher's Hornpipe." Or, (varying the simile 
a little,) not in music alone has nature decreed 
canons of counterpoint and succession. 

The best mind is that which is the most symmet- 
rically developed. Solomon counted the "scoffer" 
a fool ; but what shall we call the man who has no 
imitativeness, mirthfuUness, destructiveness and lan- 
guage? Dr. Franklin emphasized the importance of 



110 X VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

acquisitiveness, constnictiveness, concentrativeness 
and firmness; but what a ^Mvorm of the dust" is 
the creature that has no ideality and versatility I 
Precious little better is that butterfly embodiment 
of weakness which assumes to be a diletante critic, 
loving nothing useful or venerable if not beautiful 
and exquisite. 

The church has its office. But in the alternation 
of work and recreation no one need be false to liis 
-or her highest nature. The soldier or surgeon v;ho 
is a constant witness of human pain is the most cal- 
lous. Did those old monks, who prayed and fasted 
most, have the most human warmth of heart? Xot 
.every youth or maiden that occasionally' sees visions 
is to be called a visionary : not every old man or 
woman who dreams retrospections is to be adjudged 
non compos. But where ''spiritual moods," medita- 
tions and rhaj)souies, instead of being a part of life, 
^become its all, 

<' Tliat "VN-ay, madness lies. " 



SIN AND HELL. 

But then, I do not propose to attempt any diag- 
nosis of depravity, bent-aside-edness. I too well 
remember how George Combe was cudgelled by 
theologians for that chapter in his ''Constitution 
of Man," entitled ''The Hereditary Transmission 
of Qualities." I believe with Mr. Beecher, that the 
race has been working from a lower plane upwards, 
and not from a higher point downwards. And then, 
too, George Elliot has recently enunciated a great 
truth which applies to a myriad others than her self- 
willed beauty, Gwendolen : 

"Some of the goodness which Rex believed in 
was there. Goodness is a large, often a prospective 
word ; like harvest, which, at one stage when we 
talk of it, lies all under-ground, with an indeter- 
minate future : is the germ prospering in the dark- 
ness? at another, it has put forth delicate green 
blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are 
ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or 
rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may 
have the healthy life choked out of it by a particu- 
lar action of the foul land which rears or neighbors 
it, or by damage brought from foulness afar." 

Do any two persons view "sin" from precisely 



112 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

the same stand-point ? It may be well for a man of 
clerical, humanitarian, or legal antecedents to com- 
pare notes with an eminent medical professor ; for 
his views will be found to corroborate those of an}'' 
municipal magistrate.* 

The tender-hearted Cowper, if serving as a butch- 
er's apprentice, would no doubt often have been 
judged by his master a "sinner" as to his duties. 
Had the punctilious Mrs. Opie been one of Wash- 
ington's aids just before the retreat from Long Is- 
land, it isn't pleasant to contemplate the judgmnet 
of a conrt-martial upon her refusal to drop mislead- 
ing orders in the way of the British outposts. 

In accounting for the personification of good or 
evil, we must not leave out of consideration every 
bodj^'s tendency to anthropomorphism — to conceiv- 
ing a deity that would be and do as he (or she) 
would do and be if he (or she) were a deity. t Af- 
ter the Babylonian Captivity and its consequent as- 
sociations, it is not strange that the popular lan- 
guage of Christ's contemporaries disclosed traces of 
Semitic ideas of Satan and his angels and of purifi- 
cation b}^ fire. Nor that Christ should have utilized 
the popular colloquial terms in adapting his dis- 
courses to the masses. 

From our earliest dawning of intelligence as to 
right and wrong, — from our first experience of their 

* See Appendix, "B." 

t •' One phase was exemplified by the Virginia freedman who on 
hearing of the assassination of President Lincoln and Booth's 
escape from the theater, prayed: " O Lord, cotch him, and when 
you hab cotcht him, don't be so mercifu' as you generally am ; 
it won't nebber do wid dem critters." 



SIN AND HELL. 113 

respective effects upon our own feelings, or conse- 
quences upon others, — we associate right-doing with 
peace, and wrong-doing with unrest and trouble. 
Natural]}^ there comes in everj- land and age more 
or less of desire for the sanction of conduct — re- 
wards and punishments. As to the details, how- 
ever, no two individuals have precisely the same 
idea. But all are alike '' stumped" with the fact of 
the existence of apparent evil ; all confounded with 
the query of Crusoe's catechumen: ''Why God no 
kill Debil?" "The times of this ignorance God 
winked at." 

One attempted solution and remedy need not be 
adverted to, further than to quote from the author of 
^^ Liher Lihrorum" something written perhaps after 
attempting a missionary anniversary: "Traditional 
interpretation" of scripture "is slow, if not un- 
willing, to admit even the restoration of those who 
have here lived and died wihout even hearing of a 
Saviour. It looks for a counterpoise to the losses 
of the past in the salvation of infants, and in the 
possible prolongation of a millennial period until 
the number of the saved shall exceed the number 
of the lost ; an arithmatical way of treating human 
happiness and misery which has in all ages found 
plenty of admirers, although anything less Godlike 
can scarcely be conceived." 

And another observer has remarked: "The Ro- 
man Emperor in the legend put to death ten learned 
Israelites to avenge the death of Joseph by his 



114 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

brethren. And there have alwa3's been enough of 
his kidney, whose piety lies in punishing, who can 
see the justice of grudges, but not of gratitude. 
For you shall never convince the stronger feeling 
that it hath not the stronger reason, or incline him 
who hath no love to believe that there is good 
ground for loving : as we may learn from the order 
of word making, wherein love precedeth lovable,'' 
Then there is another human foible which must 
not be ignored. It has well been affirmed that " the 
most obstinate beliefs that mortals entertain about 
themselves are such as the}^ have no evidence for 
bej'ond a constant, spontaneous pulsing of their 
self-satisfaction — as it were a hidden seed of mad- 
ness, a confidence that they can move the world 
without precise notion of standing-place or lever." 
I refer, of course, to that aggressive characteristic 
in visionar}' but dreadfully would-be-good people 
which in blood}" Marys and Elisabeths we call arro- 
gance and intolerance, in mere "sinners" it is re- 
placed by a disposition to curse, when baffled. 
Yindictiveness would hardly be just the right desig- 
nation of the tendency of a spoiled child to butt its 
own head against some object on finding its pet 
Borioboola-Gha unsubscribed to. Says this self-as- 
eertion: "He'll get his pay for it, sometime, — see 
if he doesn't !" "But suppose he dies and doesn't?" 
" Well, then, if there isn't a hell, there ought to be." 
And so the wish is father to the thought.* 

* A peculiar Ulustration is disclosed in the words of a colored 



I 



SIN AND HELL. 115 

There are, of course, exceptions to the general 
rule. But I am referring to the race in general. It 
is easier, says La Rochefoucauld, to understand 
mankind than the individual.* The fact of some 
future punishment being once entertained by the 
race, there needs but one item to round out the im- 
pression, namely, to fix upon its c haracter. And 
what for this more natural and extreme than remorse, 
banishment and despair? Affirmatively so testify 
all the seers. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shake^ 
speare, &c. Says Tenn3^son : 

" This is truth the poet f sings 
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow 
Is remembering better tilings." 

It needs no stretch of fancy to forecast the bitter- 
ness of the situation : 

" No penitence and no confessional : 

No priest ordains it, yet they're forced to sit 

Amid deep ashes of their vanished years." 

Even uncertainty as to the future is a torment. In- 

orator dnring the late suspense in obtaining the presidential 
vote: *'My frien's, once I preach to a right sinfu' cong'gation. 
Bey was stiff-necked. Dey was self-sufficient. Dey wouldn't 
lis'en to nuffin. I pray wid dem. ' O Lord,' I say, ' take 'em up 
in de holler ob yer han' an' hoi' 'em ober de niouf o' hell. Hoi' 
'em dar till ye scorch 'em and scorch 'em. But, O Lord, don't 
lef 'em drop in.' So wid dese 'publican party. Dey wouldn't 
lis'en to nuffin. Dey let our breddren in de Souf be 'timidated. 
Dey done bust de rreedm"s bank. Dey kep' bad men where dey 
stole more'n eber colored people does. Now de Lord's got -em 
in de holler ob his han' and he's holdin' of 'em ober do mouf o' 
hell. An' O Lord, scorch 'em an' scorch 'em— but don t lef 'em 
drop in!" 

A religious system whose be-all and end-all of revolution is 
the "mouth of hell," reminds us of the famous receipt for mak- 
ing cannon: "First take a round hole and enclose it with iron: 
whatever you do, keeping fast hold of your round hole." 

* " II est plus aise de connaitre Ihomme en general que de con- 
naitre un homme en particulier." 

t " Nessun maggior dolore 
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella miseria.;'— DANTE. 



116 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 

deed, it is said that in some heathen countries the 
doctrine of future punishment and the consequent 
custom of purchasing indulgences has been a source 
of emolument aud power to priests, — ''a standing 
banquet for their delight in dominating." If this 
were so in Christian lands, the fact would be an ad- 
ditional explanation for the prevalence of the belief 
the world over. 



XX. 

HAPPINESS AND HEAVEN. 

Finall}^ : as in contrasting the low and narrow 
view of life with that presented from the standpoint 
of religious culture, we recognized with the Rabbi 
that " the reward of one duty is the power to fulfill 
another," so also may we turn from the pusillan- 
imous * to a magnanimous view of a future state. 
Who of us has not shared in Beattie's 3'earning ap- 
peal? — 

" Shan I be left forgotten in the dust, 

When fate relenting, lets the flower revive? 
Shall nature's voice to man alone unjust. 

Bid him, thoughi doomed to perish, hope to live? 

Is it for this fair virtue oft must strive 
With disappointment, penury and pain ? 

No : heaven's immortal spring shall yet arrive, 
And Man's majestic beauty bloom again 
Bright through the eternal year of love's triumphant 
reign," 

And then we cry out with Milton : 

" Oh, welcome ! pure-eyed Faith, white handed Hope, 
Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings." 

* ** Can a man love his own soul too well ? Who, on the whole, 
constitute the nobler class of human beings? those who have 
lived mainly to make sure of their own personal welfare in an- 
other and future condition of existence, or they who have w orked 
with all their might for their race, for their country, for the ad- 
vancement of the kingdom of God, and left all personal arrange- 
ments concerning themselves to the sole charge of Him who 
made them and is responsible to himself for their safe keeping? 
Is an anchorite that has worn the stone floor of his cell into basins 
with his knees bent in prayer, more acceptable than the soldier 
who gives his life for the. maintenance of any sacred right or 
truth, without thinking what will especially become of him in a 
world where there are two or three million colonists a month, 
from this one planet to be cared for."— Dr. O. W. HOLMES, in. 
*• Elsie Venner. 



118 A VOICE FROM THE PEWS. 



> 



And when come apprehensions of our last sleep, or 
any Shakespeare suggests 

*< A wild dedication of yourselves 
To unpathed waters, undreamed shores," 

we heed the more solemn annunciation ; 

'* Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, 
And righteous or unrighteous, being done. 
Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself 
Be laid in stillness, and the universe 
Quiver and breathe ui)on no mirror more." 

Ah, who has not at some time or another felt as did 
Charles Lamb or his Quaker friend, Hester Savoy : 

*• My sprightly neighbor gone before 
To that unknown and silent shore, 
Shall we not meet as heretofore 

Some summer morning? 
When from the cheerful eyes a ray 
Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
A bliss that will not go away, 

A sweet forewarning.-' 

The experiences of any two individuals — how 
alike, and yet how unlike! ''Lives," writes a 
thoughtful observer,* ''are enlarged in different 
ways." Still stand in common the sorrows incident 
to the limitations of human nature, the consequent 
self-discipline, and the ultimate blessing, Not any 
meat that perisheth is nutriment that permanently 
satisfies the soul. And so in one conclusion must 
we all concur: that "the chief end of man" is to 
labor for that which endureth unto eternal life, f 
And so, more and more, shall the "liberal christian" 
blend in the "evangelical" aspiration. "Come 
nearer, my God to me," and the " evangelical chris- 
tian" join the " liberal" song: 

" Nearer, my God, to thee ! '* 



* See Appendix "C." t Appendix **D.'= 



HAPPINESS AND HEAVEN. 119 



More and more, 



Whate'er denomination found, 

Must friend to friend the world around, 

The inter-echo alternate : 

<'UNTO ETERNAL LIFE." 

Adieu ! Adieu ! 't were hard to part 

If parting were forever, 
Nor whispered true tlie trusting heart 

" Tis but for Time we sever," 
Nor a gentle Voice once heard on earth 

Had charmed the soul to cherish 
The pleasures choice of heavenly hirth 

Which never, never perish. 

Roam as we may to find delight 

Amid the bowers of Beauty, 
Or work by day and watch by night 

At the scepter-beck of Duty, 
The soul will turn from riches reft 

In passing Death's dire portal. 
And f ondliest yearn for some sweets left 

Enlinked with the Immortal. 

In starlit space we proudly pause 

The rapt and revelling Reason, 
Ajid subtly trace the mystic laws 

That guide each circling season ; 
But when we seem by visioned sight 

To have searched and known the Eternal, 
* Tis but a gleam of the golden light 

That glads the powers supernal. 

The dulcet symphonies we hear 

In grove and grot resounding, 
The brooklet's hymn, the carol clear, 

Sweet Echo's voices bounding, 
The melody of human tongue,— 

All harmonies terrestrial 
Are but the prelude of the song 

Of choristers celestial. 

The fairy form that flits in grace 
Through festive hall resplendent, 

The witching charm of Woman's face, 
With rose-tint wreath transcendent, 



120 A VOICE FROM THE TEWS. 

Age shall transmute, the spell be o'er. 
And dininied the bright eye's flashes, 

As the fabled fruit of the Dead-sea shore 
In the pilgrim's grasp Is ashes. 

But the sunny cheer of Virtue meek 

That shines through the spirit-keeper, 
Though Time besere and blanch the cheek, 

Shall lovelier glow and deeper ; 
Aye, the mind may woo and the heart may cull 
. An Eden fading never, 

For the High, the True, the Beautiful, 
Are wed to the soul forever. 

B. F. B. 



THE END. 



^r 






A VOICE FROM THE PEWS: 



A rABEKNACLE SUPPLEMENT 



A MEN DER. 



td> ben .HcriuuMio^ — G^oETHE. i 



n () S 1^ O N : 

BLANCH AllD BROS., 533 TREMONT STREET. 

NEW ENGLAND NEWS COMPANY, 37 COURT STREET. 

18 7 7, 



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